M.-A. Lemburg
In any case, this will avoid use the trouble of having to check those poly numbers every time Intel decides to bump the register width by another factor of two ;-)
This seems unlikely. 2^64 = 18446744073709551616, which is roughly 10 ^ 22. Let's assume a memory density, of, say 2^20 machine words or roughly 8 megabytes per cubic centimeter (much, *much* better than we'll be able to do for the forseeable future -- remember power distribution and heat dissipation). Then, approximating the cubic relation between a sphere's volume and area by lopping off a power of four, we see that 2^64 64-bit words of memory would occupy a sphere of roughly 2^(64 - 20 - 2) cm radius, or about 17 million kilometers. This is roughly twice the diameter of the Sun. 64-bit computers aren't going to run out of address space any time soon. 64-bit clocks counting seconds will turn over in approximately six trillion years, long after the expansion of the Universe will have dropped its energy density low enough to make computation...well, let's just say "difficult" and leave it at that. Nobody needs 128 bits of integer or floating-point precision, either. There's basically no source of data to compute with that's got anywhere near 22 significant digits of accuracy -- 48 bits is about the most people in scientific computing ever use. -- <a href="http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr/">Eric S. Raymond</a> [President Clinton] boasts about 186,000 people denied firearms under the Brady Law rules. The Brady Law has been in force for three years. In that time, they have prosecuted seven people and put three of them in prison. You know, the President has entertained more felons than that at fundraising coffees in the White House, for Pete's sake." -- Charlton Heston, FOX News Sunday, 18 May 1997