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> Why would we want to switch to 128 bit addresses Predicting the future is difficult. 30 years ago (I am old enough to remember) it was hard to imagine that e
by usr1106 7y ago
> Why would we want to switch to 128 bit addresses
Predicting the future is difficult. 30 years ago (I am old enough to remember) it was hard to imagine that every household would have 10s of devices connected to the internet. My university VAX for 16 concurrent student users had less memory than required to show the splash screen when today's phone boots.
So if in 30 years the computing paradigm has changed and we directly address memory over the internet? I must admit that in my imagination we have reached a point where growth will slow down. But I have learned that my imagination is not always good enough.
- hvidgaard 7y agoDirect addressing that way seems unfeasible, it would require a extending the IP stack to support direct addressing for it to work, and it already support 128 bit addresses. A far more feasible model is direct addressing through a unique IP, and we do not need a bigger address space for that. That said, considering the current amounts of data Google holds, I could see the theoretical point about unique addressing every single byte they have. 64bit addressing only allow for a single order of magnitude of growth in that scenario.