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Why we don't have 128-bit CPUs
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this post was submitted on 23 Jun 2024
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Yeah, 64 bit handles almost all use cases we have. Sometimes we want double the precision (a double) or length (a long), but we can do that without being 128-bit. It's harder to do half. Sure, it'd be slightly faster for some things, but it's not significant.
And you can get 128-bit data to the CPU, so those things can be fast if we need them to be.
And we have wide instructions that can process this data, such as for multimedia applications.
Addressing and memory size has been the historic motivator for wider registers, but it’s probably not going to be in my lifetime that I see the need for 128.
There's plenty of instructions for processing integers and fp numbers from 8 bits to 512 bits with a single instruction and register. There's been a lot of work in packed math instructions for neural network inference.