[Info-vax] OT: IA-128 ???

[JF Mezei]

Marc Schlensog wrote:

> A 128bit file system would be an entirely different story. But you
> don't need a 128bit CPU for that.

Lets say they were to produce an 8086 with 64 bit addressing, and 128
bit registers and data paths.

Are there many operations that were really benefit from that ?

Moving long strings from one location to another would be faster since
half the fetch/strore operations would be needed to move data around.

But for integer math, would it really make a difference ? How many
applications need to process numbers greater than 2^64 ? I think that
even Bill Gates's net worth fits comfortably within 64 bits.

Does IEEE already have a 128 version of the floating point
representation ? Would creating 128but floating point registers provide
advantages for high end computtional work (or video games) ?


The move from 32 bit to 64 bit was made, as I recall, mostly to allow to
go beyond the 4 gig of ram limit in 32 bit, and mostly to allow atabase
engine to store more of s database in memory to increase performance.

Perhaps going 128 bits addressing  might allow mapping
 of very big files to memory ? In other words, you may not have more
than 64 bit's worth of phyical memory,  but your whole database of
terabytes of records would be mapped to memory (think global section in
VMS terns).

Google might be a driver for this, when you consider it has huge
databases (images for google erth street vie etc).