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 big change from 32 bits to 64 bits was changing the width that the memory controller dealt with so instead of being limited to 4 GB of RAM we can now use 17 billion GB of RAM (16 Exabytes), there isn’t much point going up to 128 bits for a longggg while.
In the early console days 8 bit vs 16 bit vs 32 bit was about the size of the data that the processor could work with, but modern processors work with data much larger than the addresses they can talk to. AVX (advanced vector extensions) instruction set was added in 2011 that let CPUs work with 128 bit data chunks, AVX2 expanded it to 256 bits, and AVX-512 is used on some of the Intel server processors to let them perform operations on 512 bit long data chunks
We’re unlikely to move to more than 64 bit memory addresses (most processors only use 42 bits right now) so you will likely never see a “128 bit” processor despite your processor handling 128 bit chunks of data on a regular basis
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