Technology

59295 readers

4310 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.

Our Rules

Follow the lemmy.world rules.
Only tech related content.
Be excellent to each another!
Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
Politics threads may be removed.
No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed

Approved Bots

founded 1 year ago

MODERATORS

276

Why we don't have 128-bit CPUs (www.xda-developers.com)

submitted 4 months ago by jwr1@kbin.earth to c/technology@lemmy.world

131 comments fedilink hide all child comments

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] wewbull@feddit.uk 15 points 4 months ago (1 children)

We can, but it's awkward to do so. By having everything work with powers of 2 you don't need to have everything the same size, but can still pack things in memory efficiently.

If your registers were 48bits long, you can use it to store 6 bytes, or 3 short ints, but only one int with 16-bits going unused. If they are powers of two in size, you can always fit smaller things in them with no wasted space.

[–] asmoranomar@lemmy.world 11 points 4 months ago

A better example is to explain the chaos of having to go to the grocery store and pick up some hot dogs and buns. You know the pain.