• vrighter@discuss.tchncs.de
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    14
    ·
    1 year ago

    exactly the same as 64 bit computing, except pointers now take up twice as much ram, and therefore you need mire baseline momory throuput/ more cache, for pretty much no practical benefit. Because we aren’t close to fully using up a 64-bit address space .

    • botengang@feddit.de
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      3
      ·
      1 year ago

      Our modern 64 bit processors do use 128 bits for certain vector operations though, don’t they? So there is another aspect apart from address space.

      • I need NOS@lemm.ee
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        3
        ·
        1 year ago

        Yes, up to 512 bits since Skylake. But there are very few real-world tasks that can make use of such wide data paths. One example is media processing, where a 512-bit register could be used to pack 8 64-bit operands and act on all of them simultaneously, because there is usually a steady stream of data to be process using similar operations. In other tasks, where processing patters can’t make use of such batched approaches, the extra bits would essentially be wasted.