"Eric S. Raymond" wrote: > > M.-A. Lemburg <mal@lemburg.com>: > > In any case, this will avoid us the trouble of having to check > > those poly numbers every time Intel decides to bump the register > > width by another factor of two ;-) > > This seems unlikely. > > 2^64 = 18446744073709551616, which is roughly 10 ^ 22. Let's assume > a memory density, of, say 2^20 machine words or roughly 8 megabytes per > cubic centimeter (much, *much* better than we'll be able to do for the > forseeable future -- remember power distribution and heat dissipation). Where did you get those numbers from ? There are memory sticks with 128 MB around and these measure about 2.5 cm^2 * 1 mm. > Then, approximating the cubic relation between a sphere's volume and area > by lopping off a power of four, we see that 2^64 64-bit words of memory > would occupy a sphere of roughly 2^(64 - 20 - 2) cm radius, or about > 17 million kilometers. > > This is roughly twice the diameter of the Sun. 64-bit computers > aren't going to run out of address space any time soon. > > 64-bit clocks counting seconds will turn over in approximately six > trillion years, long after the expansion of the Universe will have > dropped its energy density low enough to make computation...well, > let's just say "difficult" and leave it at that. > > Nobody needs 128 bits of integer or floating-point precision, either. > There's basically no source of data to compute with that's got > anywhere near 22 significant digits of accuracy -- 48 bits is > about the most people in scientific computing ever use. Just you wait... someday marketing people will probably invent the world memory facility and start assigning a few hundred Terabytes for everyone on this planet to use for his/her data storage -- store once, use everywhere ;-) Let's assume we have 12e9 people on this planet by that time, then we'll need 12e9*100e12 = 1.2e24 bytes of central storage... or roughly 2^80 bytes per civilization. Of course, they will want to run Python in order to manage that data and so will all those Palm uses hooking up to the facility... ;-) -- Marc-Andre Lemburg CEO eGenix.com Software GmbH ______________________________________________________________________ Company & Consulting: http://www.egenix.com/ Python Software: http://www.lemburg.com/python/
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