this post was submitted on 15 Oct 2026
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Kinda funny to think that I won't be living through any more migrations to the next power of 2. They happened so rapidly at first.
Each "bit" in the architecture is mainly related to how many different memory positions you can address with a CPU opcode (i.e. an assembly command) that needs to access memory or with a CPU register that holds an memory address (so an 8 bit register can only address 256 memory positions, a 16 bit one 65,538 memory positions, a 32 bit one 4,294,967,296 memory positions and so on) - basically every additional bit in the register size of a CPU that addresses memory roughly doubles the memory that CPU can access and thus use (not considering hacks to go around those limits, such as the Spectrum 128K had).
Meanwhile Moore's Law predicts that "the number of transistors in an integrated circuit doubles about every two years" which for integrated circuits roughly means that every two years the amount of memory that can be in the same integrated circuit area doubles.
So if Moore's Law kept working, each architecture bit roughly gives you two more years until the availability of memory catches up- This means that the transition from 32-bit to 64-bit architectures per Moore's Law gave us 64 years until we have to move to an architecture with more bits because memory available is so big that CPUs are unable to use so much memory.
Were we are now, 64 bits is enough to address 8 Exabytes of memory.
That said, extrapolating from the current trend in growth of memory in PCs, we will reach the point when we will start hitting the constraints of that in ... NEVER - thanks to the AI bubble the newer PCs are coming out with the same or less memory than the previous generation, so the trend of available memory is not upwards but downwards.
the only good thing to come out of the ai bubble
?
means less room for bloatware
The apps are going to be vibecoded and consume even more memory.
Not while all of the memory is going to the datacenters. Commercial applications may be built on some Raizen 407000, which sucks, but hobbyist projects will all be made on regular computer, during the shortage. Unfortunately, Linux isn't really a hobbyist project... Was thinking NetBSD.
Moore's Law finally caught up with our ability to make rocks calculate for us. It was going to happen eventually, I find it somewhat comforting that hardware has finally plateaued, and will only get incremental changes for a while. It means that the next computer I build, I can expect it to last for multiple decades, rather than just one.
Ohh fear not! Hardware didn't plateau. Our current architectural needs plateaued. We're still doing everything on 2d layers layers in a way that makes things organized. I'm sure they'll shove AI in there and the next gen stuff will be unsupportable chaotic 3D tetris stuff and the memory/bus sizes will be old hat.
The thing is though that now build quality is going to matter WAY more. Like you need that laptop chassis built like a tank. Which is harder to find in new devices these days.
Yeah, and power supplies and such that aren't limited by silicon but capacitor cycling are going to matter more and be limiting factors. Replaceable batteries and power management in phones, laptops, etc are going to be crucial
640 bit ought to be enough for everyone!
Fwiw, CPUs/GPUs use 128bit wide buses (eg 4060, I think) and wider. So you're kinda there already.
64-bit here refers to the size of the general purpose registers; but wider (larger) registers are common too in chips that are still referred to as x86_64.