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Technology Stocks : Advanced Micro Devices - Moderated (AMD) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: TGPTNDR who wrote (81208)	5/31/2002 6:18:25 PM
From: Win Smith	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 275872

The main reason for more bits is addressing. 32 bits can address 4 gigabytes of memory. 64 bits can address 4 gigabytes * 4 gigabytes, or 16 mega terabytes , or 16 * 1018 bytes. I don't think there will be a conventional computer built with that much memory, in our lifetimes anyway. 128 bits can address, um, 1038 bytes, which might conceivably be useful for a shared universal address space or capability based machines or something, but is well beyond anything that will be realizable as a conventional physical address space. Big numbers can be handled by other means than increasing the basic machine word.