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by Dagonfly
616 days ago
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It's quite intriguing to think about when and in which applications this bit-length churn will end. For example, 64-bit UNIX epoch will work for 292 billion years. That's longer than the age of the universe and obviously enough. Meanwhile, signed 64-bit nanosecond (!) timestamps only range from 1678 AD to 2262 AD. That seems quite restrictive. So ultimately somewhere around 96-bits of time seems to be "enough" for any practical application. For audio we've probably crossed the point already. Uncompressed audio is in the ballpark of a few Mbit/s. Humans will probably never need Gbit audio. What's the limit for video? Seems to be undetermined yet. All of this will limit the max compute resources humanity will need for certain applications. Maybe we will see the widespread use of 128-bit computers during our lifetimes. Mostly for virtual addressing fun. But will 256-bit ever be needed? |
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Not at current rates of demand. During the 80s and 90s demand for RAM increased a thousandfold per decade, from 1 KB to 1 MB to 1 GB by 2000-ish. At that rate we'd expect normal users to exceed a 64-bit address space by the 2040s. But instead demand has slowed dramatically, and after 20 years a power user might only have 64 gigs, or 128 if they're feeling spicy. Apple is still selling computers with only 8 gigs of un-upgradeable RAM. And as for virtual memory, I doubt that consumer machines have any legitimate reason to chafe against the 16-exabyte limit (until such time as we're selling zettabyte hard drives, which is fantasy at this point). Servers and supercomputers might be a different story, but even servers are going to be loath to pay the cost of halving the speed of ordinary operations just to double the addressable memory space.