Thou shalt have no other gods before the ANSI C standard 1652

Thomas lovein

You know what? You're starting to raise doubts in my mind about whether we can confidently rule out the possibility of 2^64 bytes of addressable memory in our lifetime. Your 3D movie example does show that people may *want* to have 2^64 bytes of memory, though it doesn't say whether it will be possible for technology to deliver on that goal within our lifetime, and it doesn't say when in our lifetime it will be feasible to get our hands on devices that give us 2^64 bytes of addressable memory.

I'm still skeptical we'll be able to get sufficient bandwidth out of such a memory to make it useful to have a 2^64-byte memory. I suspect it is going to be a real challenge to get 2^51 bytes per second bandwidth out of such a thing, and that is what you'd need if you were going to show a 2-hour 2^64-byte movie. It is worth keeping in mind that memory latencies are improving much less rapidly than CPU speeds: memory latencies are not on a doubling every 18 months Moore's law curve. I haven't heard any plausible story how we're going to get enough improvement on latency within our lifetime to make 2^64 bytes of addressable memory useful.

Still, your example is getting closer to a good answer than anything else I've seen so far, so you're starting to shake my confidence in my prediction.