When chips and programs went from 32 bit to 64 bit it was a huge leap forward, what is holding us back from going to 128bit?
In: Technology
Lets say you’re a postal service that has an automatic mail sorter. You find that if you limit the number of characters and numbers on the address to be at most 32, the automated sorter takes 0.01 seconds to sort each piece of mail. You sell letters with 32 blanks on it so the automated sorter scans them easily. Even if the address doesn’t use all 32 blanks, it still has to check each blank and so can’t go faster than 0.01 seconds. Since you serve a community that doesn’t have a need for more addresses than can be represented with 32 characters, this works quite well for you.
Then your community grows. Now, 32 characters isn’t enough to account for each unique address. You need to allow for more characters if you’ll hope to serve all your new citizens. You decide to upgrade the limit of characters on a letter from 32 to 64. Now you can fit a much bigger address in the 64 blanks provided on your letter, but it takes the automated reader 0.02 seconds to read each letter since it has to check twice the number of blanks on the letter. This doubles the time it takes to sort each letter even if it’s address is 32 or smaller.
32, 64, 128 bits in this instance refers to how your operating system references memory. A 32 bit system can reference 2^32, which is 4 gigabytes, a 64 bit system can reference 2^64, which is about 16 exabytes. Every single time you move memory around outside of the processor, you need to enter it’s full address though, and having a bigger address means a bigger number to compute, which means a bigger overhead. It’s a trade off we’re not going to make until we need to.
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