• irotsoma@lemmy.world
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    5 months ago

    Because computers have come even close to needing more than 16 exabytes of memory for anything. And how many applications need to do basic mathematical operations on numbers greater than 2^64. Most applications haven’t even exceeded the need for 32 bit operations, so really the push to 64bit was primarily to appease more than 4GB of memory without slow workarounds.

    • tunetardis@lemmy.ca
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      5 months ago

      I know a google engineer who was saying they’re having to update their code bases to handle > 16 exabytes of storage, if you can imagine. But yeah, that’s storage, not RAM.