3 ms·
It may seem like a large amount of memory today, but it may not be for tomorrow, just like 4 GB main ram seemed a huge amount of memory 30 years ago.
by axilmar 13y ago
It may seem like a large amount of memory today, but it may not be for tomorrow, just like 4 GB main ram seemed a huge amount of memory 30 years ago.
- userbinator 13y agoWhen x86 started going over 4GB and getting the 64-bit extensions, it was thought that a 64-bit address space would be so big (more than 4 billion times bigger than a 32-bit one) that it would take many decades before we run into that limit; and that wasn't too long ago either - the first AMD64 CPU was in 2003, only 11 years ago, and it supported "only" 52 bits of physical address. Now we have 64TB, which is 2^46, which means there's only 18 "unused" bits of address left - 256K. If you could connect only(!) 262,144 of these machines together and present the memory on them as one big unit, you would have exhausted the 64-bit address space. That is what I think is really incredible. What's next, 128-bit addresses? Or maybe we'll realise that segmented address spaces (e.g. something like 96-bit, split as 32:64) are naturally more suited to the locality of NUMA than flat ones?