Only part of going to 64 bit is the <4G address space. The other part is being able to crunch 64 bits on each clock cycle. True, hardly anyone is programming to use this ability, but it will come.
As the More's law corollaries continue to hand us more and more transistors on a platter, we'll have to find somethings to do with them. Part of that will be 128 bits per byte.
(Remember: 128 bits is an ipv6 address: big routers will want to be able to handle these addresses in one swop: So we will see specialized 128-bit processors in the near future!)
__________________
The only dumb question is a question not asked.
The only dumb answer is an answer not given.
|