It's very difficult to see normal computers that normal people use needing it any time soon, I agree. Frontier has 9.2PB of memory though, so that's 50bits f

It's very difficult to see normal computers that normal people use needing it any time soon, I agree. Frontier has 9.2PB of memory though, so that's 50bits for a petabyte and then 4 more bits, 54bits of memory addressability if we wanted to byte address it all. Looking at it that way, if super computers continue to be funded and grow like they have, we're getting shockingly close to 64bits of addressable memory. I don't know that that really means we need 128bit, 80 or 96bits buys a lot of time, but it's probably worth a little bit of thought. I don't know how many of you remember the pre-386 days. It was an effort to write interesting programs though, 512KB or 640KB of memory to work with but it was 16bit addressable and so you're writing code to manage segments and stuff, it's an extra degree of complexity and a pain to debug. 32bits seemed like a godsend when it happened. I imagine most of the dorks on here have ripped a blu-ray or transcoded a video image from somewhere, it's not super unusual to be dealing with a single file that cannot be represented as bytes with a 32bit pointer. It's all about cost and value, 64bits is still a staggering amount of memory but if the protein folding problems and climate models and what have you need 80bits of memory to represent the problem space, I would hope that the people building those don't also have to worry about the memory "shoe boxing" problems of yesteryear too.