64 WASM effect on cycle burn rate

What is the expected effect on the cycle burn rate when WASM goes to 64 bit?

wasm64 operations are a little bit more expensive, and Motoko with EOP enabled has a larger memory footprint than current canisters without EOP. I expect that cycles burn will rise a slowly over time, but not substantially because of wasm64 alone.

What could change cycles burn more is secondary effects: wasm64 enables new compute capabilities. If heap memory rises, then AI inference becomes easier to do, and that could drive some more cycles burn

2 Likes

Can you please share some benchmarking stats or share a link of the repo?

This is all I could find quickly. If you want more details I can ask the team.

Source:

/// The cycle cost overhead of executing canister instructions when running in Wasm64 mode.
/// This overhead is a multiplier over the cost of executing the same instructions
/// in Wasm32 mode. The overhead comes from the bound checks performed in Wasm64 mode
/// as well as larger heap sizes that lead to larger application working sets.
pub const WASM64_INSTRUCTION_COST_OVERHEAD: u128 = 2;
1 Like