I guess I don't have $1000 to bet, but I wouldn't be quite that sure.
No application _requires_ any number of bits > 1. It's a question of
performance. After all, a Z80 could have 512M RAM, just not
contiguously (and would probably require a lot of hardware to access
it). There are plenty of tasks that can use up much more than 4GB ram,
most notably databases and various graphics. 1GB is currently the
amount of RAM a high-end server can be expected to have, and in CGI
and engineering applications, even this isn't enough. To sum up,
volume always fills capacity, as the highway engineers that are
tearing up boston haven't learned yet. But, what's the amount of RAM
a 128-bit processor can access?
>I beg to differ, and I'm willing to put my money where my mouth is.
I'm
>willing to bet $1000 that there will be no practical applications
requiring
>processors with 128-bit addressing by October 24, 2003. Any takers?
>
>> Yep. Short-sightedness (and history) is seemingly repeating on this
list.
>
>We'll see.
>
>This is not the same shortsightedness as the old series of claims:
>
> You'll never need more than 1K of RAM.
> You'll never need more than 4K of RAM.
> You'll never need more than 16K of RAM.
> You'll never need more than 32K of RAM.
> You'll never need more than 64K of RAM.
> You'll never need more than 128K of RAM.
> You'll never need more than 256K of RAM.
> You'll never need more than 512K of RAM.
> You'll never need more than 640K of RAM.
> You'll never need more than 1M of RAM.
> You'll never need more than 4M of RAM.
> You'll never need more than 16M of RAM.
> You'll never need more than 64M of RAM.
> You'll never need more than 256M of RAM.
>
>And yes, I've heard every single one of these statements made at one
>time or another. I haven't yet heard anyone claim that I'll never need
>more than 512M of RAM. My current Linux workstation has 384M of RAM,
>of which I routinely use more than 300M for large compiles (and I do
mean
>LARGE compiles, some require over 500M virtual) and for image
processing.
>
>Eric
>
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Received on Sat Oct 24 1998 - 17:10:25 BST