Your modern Intel chip only has 48 addressable virtual address bits. The recent Ice Lake processors support 57 bits. I deal daily with Python processes that h

Your modern Intel chip only has 48 addressable virtual address bits. The recent Ice Lake processors support 57 bits. I deal daily with Python processes that have "6.1t" in the "resident" column in top. Hitting the 48-bit 256 TiB limit isn't science fiction to me. I can already hit that with a moderate amount of effort (by memory mapping ~100 large kv-stores). It isn't that I need to do it, but I could imagine that someone does. It is well and proper that Intel rounded up to 64 bits. It should serve us well for the next 40ish years, which is good enough for my professional lifetime at least.