Which reminds me of an article about how HDTV is a pain for porn, since you need to do a lot better job with makeup when you can see every blemish. The airbrush got invented for a reason, after all.
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### Author:  [@Tuckerfan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Tuckerfan)
#### Post date: [May 13, 2007, 2:15pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-will-we-do-with-1024-bit-computers/403865/10 "2007-05-13T14:15:21Z")
[QUOTE=Voyager]
The reason 64 bits is better than 32 is that we were running out of 32 bit address space. Let me know when you need a memory (even a virtual one) bigger than 2 \*\* 64 bytes.
[/QUOTE]
“I don’t see why anyone would ever need more than 640K RAM.” Bill Gates
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### Author:  [@Boyo\_Jim](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Boyo_Jim)
#### Post date: [May 13, 2007, 2:26pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-will-we-do-with-1024-bit-computers/403865/11 "2007-05-13T14:26:56Z")
[QUOTE=Tuckerfan]
“I don’t see why anyone would ever need more than 640K RAM.” Bill Gates
[/QUOTE]
“There is no reason for anyone to have a computer in their home” - Ken Olson, 1977, founder of DEC.
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### Author:  [@Tapioca\_Dextrin](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Tapioca_Dextrin)
#### Post date: [May 13, 2007, 2:38pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-will-we-do-with-1024-bit-computers/403865/12 "2007-05-13T14:38:52Z")
[“I think there is a world market for maybe five computers,”](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_J._Watson#Famous_misquote) 😉
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### Author:  [@ultrafilter](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/ultrafilter)
#### Post date: [May 13, 2007, 2:54pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-will-we-do-with-1024-bit-computers/403865/13 "2007-05-13T14:54:06Z")
Still, a 64-bit address space lets you have up to about 4 billion GB of RAM. I may be just as bad as the earlier futurists, but I can’t imagine any need for more than that.
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### Author:  [@Contrapuntal](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Contrapuntal)
#### Post date: [May 13, 2007, 4:20pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-will-we-do-with-1024-bit-computers/403865/14 "2007-05-13T16:20:28Z")
[QUOTE=Tapioca Dextrin]
[“I think there is a world market for maybe five computers,”](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_J._Watson#Famous_misquote) 😉
[/QUOTE]
Your cite claims that the quote is apocryphal.
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### Author:  [@Contrapuntal](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Contrapuntal)
#### Post date: [May 13, 2007, 4:25pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-will-we-do-with-1024-bit-computers/403865/15 "2007-05-13T16:25:31Z")
[QUOTE=Boyo Jim]
“There is no reason for anyone to have a computer in their home” - Ken Olson, 1977, founder of DEC.
[/QUOTE]
[He wasn’t talking about PCs.](http://www.snopes.com/quotes/kenolsen.asp)
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### Author:  [@threemae](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/threemae)
#### Post date: [May 13, 2007, 4:33pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-will-we-do-with-1024-bit-computers/403865/16 "2007-05-13T16:33:39Z")
In all fairness to **Voyager** , the ability of a 32 or 64 bit system to address things is growing exponentially compared to something like the actual size of RAM where 1 mb is one 1mb of RAM.
So, the jump to a 1024 bit architecture is a much larger one than it appears.
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### Author:  [@Boyo\_Jim](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Boyo_Jim)
#### Post date: [May 13, 2007, 5:25pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-will-we-do-with-1024-bit-computers/403865/17 "2007-05-13T17:25:45Z")
[QUOTE=Contrapuntal]
[He wasn’t talking about PCs.](http://www.snopes.com/quotes/kenolsen.asp)
[/QUOTE]
Yeah, like George Tenet didn’t mean that it was a slam dunk that Saddam had WMDs. He said it, exactly as I quoted. And, aside from the part about “controlling every aspect of our lives”, he was wrong about even what he DID claim to mean. I would LOVE a home where the computer switched the lights on and off, prepared the meals, ordered supplies that were running low, and two dozen other things I’m too lazy to think of (but if you asked my home-controlling computer, IT could tell you). 😛
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### Author:  [@NurseCarmen](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/NurseCarmen)
#### Post date: [May 13, 2007, 5:35pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-will-we-do-with-1024-bit-computers/403865/18 "2007-05-13T17:35:25Z")
I work in a supercomputing institute, and the computers are used to do heavy research into genomes, physics, chemistry, and other scientific fields. You would be amazed how many of the companies that make software for this research still have _16_ bit! Only a handful have released 64 bit versions.
So in short, porn. It drives the technology much more than the sciences.
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### Author:  [@TimeWinder](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/TimeWinder)
#### Post date: [May 13, 2007, 6:30pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-will-we-do-with-1024-bit-computers/403865/19 "2007-05-13T18:30:48Z")
[QUOTE=ultrafilter]
Still, a 64-bit address space lets you have up to about 4 billion GB of RAM. I may be just as bad as the earlier futurists, but I can’t imagine any need for more than that.
[/QUOTE]
Strong AI (that is, attempting to build computers with human-class intelligences) might need that level of RAM – there are more than a trillion neurons in the human brain, so representing each neuron plus to connections to each other would get you into about that amount of RAM.
Of course, usually these sorts of problems aren’t solved brute force, the brain is suspected to be highly redundant, and evolution rarely selects the most efficient solution for a given problem (especially a highly complex problem). And then there’s the question of how to access all that RAM – today’s CPU’s would take forever just to access each of these addresses once: doing real computation on them would be too slow to be useful. But CPU’s are still getting faster and/or more parallel, too.
I don’t actually disagree with you: I can’t see the current serially-addressed, monolithic address space surviving much beyond the 64-bit era, but I wouldn’t be that surprised if I turned out to be wrong.
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### Author:  [@Indistinguishable](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Indistinguishable)
#### Post date: [May 14, 2007, 2:12am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-will-we-do-with-1024-bit-computers/403865/20 "2007-05-14T02:12:48Z")
[QUOTE=ultrafilter]
Still, a 64-bit address space lets you have up to about 4 billion GB of RAM. I may be just as bad as the earlier futurists, but I can’t imagine any need for more than that.
[/QUOTE]
It seems to me it’s more like 17 billion GB of RAM. Cause, you know, 4 billion GB wasn’t actually going to be enough for my purposes…
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