would ever passing a primitive to functions by reference be more effecient ?

[Garrett2011]

In a scenario that a caller function needs to pass one of its local variables of a primitive type to a callee and doesn't necessarily need to pass it by reference to track that variable later after callee is done, I know that it'd be said to pass it by value and that makes total sense for primitive types with a size equal to or smaller than size of pointer; but I'm curious that from an assembly point(performance-wise or space-wise), wouldn't be there a situation when passing a variable of a primitive type with a size bigger than pointers like long double on my platform which has a size of 8 bytes and is bigger than pointers that have a size of 4 bytes; by reference would be more efficient? like an imagined situation where pointer can be loaded directly into some register by caller but the primitive itself not and thus no need to load the pointer from callee stack frame to some register by callee and there's 8 more free bytes of stack memory in the end comparing to pass by value where there'd be 8 more used bytes of stack memory.
If in this specific case, passing by reference might ever be more efficient, how can we know to pass by reference or value?

[Bazzy]

You shouldn't this deep into optimisation. The compiler will know better than you what to do

[Garrett2011]

You shouldn't this deep into optimization. The compiler will know better than you what to do

I love to leave it to compiler of course, but the thing is we tell the compiler to pass it by value or reference ! am I wrong?

[jsmith]

I wrote this article to once and for all answer this question. Bazzy's answer is essentially right though.

http://www.cplusplus.com/forum/articles/20193/