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0 pointsdaveguy9y ago0 comments

Probably. It's unlikely we will be upgrading to 128 bit computers any time soon. 64 bit words are enough to store a double precision floating point number and enough bits to directly address 18.4 exabytes of RAM. The jump from 32 to 64 is a huge leap and any issues we were having with a 32 bit word are solved for a much longer period than the jump from 16 to 32 bit.

2^8 => 2^16 : 256x increase

2^16 => 2^32 : 65,536x increase

2^32 => 2^64 : 4,294,967,296x increase

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flukus9y ago

I know it doesn't seem likely, but these things have a way of creeping up on you. 25 years ago the prospect of everyone having 8 GB of ram was far fetched, computers still had 8MB and 8GB hard drives were years off. In 10 years we could have petabytes in our phones and from there exabytes aren't such a huge leap.

daveguyOP9y ago

But to put it in perspective

8MB => 8GB : 1,000x increase

8GB => 8EB : 1,000,000,000x increase

The leap to 8 exabytes is 6 orders of magnitude greater than the last 25 years.

That would be 30 Moore's doublings (applied to storage) and would take 60 years. Oh, and we would still be able to address all of the ram with a 64 bit address.

In 10 years we will be closer to 256 GB in the phone, not petabytes or even terabytes (but terabytes would be close).

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