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
The primary advantage of going from 32 bit to 64 bit is that you can address a larger area. 32 bit can address about 4 gigabytes – which is a lot, but still less than many media files. 64 bit can already address 18.4 exabytes – which is far more than you can usefully address in the first place.
There’s also an inherent inefficiency with regards to larger bit widths. The overwhelming majority of calculations your computer makes are relatively small. Yet you need 32 or 64 parallel paths to accommodate these trivially small calculations when you could easily make do with many fewer circuits.
So while we could easily make 128 bit processors, there really isn’t much demand for them.
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