On Friday 15 April 2005 01:32, Susemail wrote:
On Thursday 14 April 2005 16:06, Sid Boyce wrote: [snip]
Strange, I can't remember anyone asking a similar question when CPU's went from 8 --> 16-bit or 16-bit --> 32-bit, perhaps it was too obvious back then.
No, it's just that it seems to me that 32 bit serves most users very well. 16 bit was limited and in most situations 64 bit seems like overkill to me.
I don't think we'll be using 512 bit registers in a hundred years, for example.
heh heh heh. Maybe we have a new, great computing "truth" here. Add to: "I think there is a world market for maybe five computers." -- Thomas Watson. Senior, Chairman of IBM, 1943 "Nobody will ever need more than 640k RAM!" -- Bill Gates. Someone who dug CP/M source code out of other people's garbage cans.
I could be wrong but I think 32bit to 64 bit is the sweet spot for most of our computing needs. Really I think 32bit is the sweet spot but I'll hedge my bet with 64 bit too.
The problem with the software development world is that software developers assume their program is the beneficiary of all system resources. No matter what the technological advance, software advances as fast, or even faster, to consume and overtake it. Today, developers code for their own convenience without regard or respect for system resources. While hard drives, physical RAM and CPU caches have become faster and larger, code has bloated even faster, negating the performance increase. From what I see of the entry-level people we hire and fire at work, schools aren't teaching programmers how computers work at even a fundamental level, so they have no real idea what "efficient" means. It is quite common to find some Object Oriented "expert" (that's someone with a degree and one job on their resume) who can't build a simple C char array. I've seen quite a few who have no clue at all that a C pointer corresponds to an instrumental, functional part of the CPU and is not merely a language syntax construct. I still have an Amiga 3000 kicking around -- 25MHz 68030 and 16M RAM. (For that sytem 16M is HUGE -- especially back in 1990) I'm amazed that in 90% of practical situations there is no appreciable difference between using the Amiga and using my 1.8Ghz, 1G RAM linux system (or even "faster" Windows systems at work). The GUI is light and fast -- it even makes icewm feel bloated. The apps are a tiny fraction of the size of similar programs on the contemporary platforms and seem to load instantly. It still works as well as it does, because it was designed by a bunch of uber-geeks who had to care that the 68000 address range was only 16M.