We are looking at 50+ bits today if you want to mmap the largest off the shelf files you'll be able to store on local disk on some of the servers available even from the average system integrator. 47-48bits of physical RAM for shared-memory setups from companies like SGI, possibly more.
And it's not that big a leap: 15 years ago, I worked mostly on systems with <1GB RAM, and where to get a decent performance 1TB+ disk array, we were looking at a fridge sized monstrosity. Today, my laptop has more than that. Even my phone is closing in: 1GB RAM + 64GB storage (even some mid range Chinese phones today advertise support for 256GB SD cards, so it is already obsolete)
15 years before that again - 1985 - my machine had 64KB of RAM and 176KB floppies. A couple of years later I finally got 1MB of RAM and a 20MB HD.
So I don't consider it unreasonable to assume that we'll have systems in the 1PB RAM range and 1000+ PB storage range by 2030. That's about 50 bits for physical memory alone, or more like 60 bits to memory map that much secondary storage.
That's assuming no shared memory eating address space for example.
For most people, it will not be that relevant for a few more years, just like it took several years from 32bit became an issue on servers until it mattered for home computers, and like how 32 bit is first now becoming an issue for mobile.
But think about that for a second: We don't need 64 bit for our mobile phones. We do nothing on them we couldn't find ways to shoehorn into a 32bit address space for decades to come. But going to 64bit is convenient. It lets us shove 8GB or 16GB RAM or more into future systems and not have to think so much about memory efficiency. So we're going there.
Thus the idea that "humanity will never need more than 64 bits" I think is pretty much ridiculous, because it puts things on its head: It's not that we will "need" it, but that we will easily find ways of making use of it if we can. E.g. direct addressing all your storage is convenient in all kinds of ways. Storing all your home videos uncompressed, unedited, in 8K resolutions, in 3D, at a higher frame rate, becomes convenient when there's enough storage. Being able to write apps that can mmap multi PB monstrosity video projects instead of worrying about disk buffering becomes convenient when it's possible to do it.
It's not that long since I used to consider databases of a few hundred MB big. Now I throw around multi GB databases on a daily basis, and I know they are small for a lot of people, who deal with individual databases in the TB or PB size without blinking.
And it's not that big a leap: 15 years ago, I worked mostly on systems with <1GB RAM, and where to get a decent performance 1TB+ disk array, we were looking at a fridge sized monstrosity. Today, my laptop has more than that. Even my phone is closing in: 1GB RAM + 64GB storage (even some mid range Chinese phones today advertise support for 256GB SD cards, so it is already obsolete)
15 years before that again - 1985 - my machine had 64KB of RAM and 176KB floppies. A couple of years later I finally got 1MB of RAM and a 20MB HD.
So I don't consider it unreasonable to assume that we'll have systems in the 1PB RAM range and 1000+ PB storage range by 2030. That's about 50 bits for physical memory alone, or more like 60 bits to memory map that much secondary storage.
That's assuming no shared memory eating address space for example.
For most people, it will not be that relevant for a few more years, just like it took several years from 32bit became an issue on servers until it mattered for home computers, and like how 32 bit is first now becoming an issue for mobile.
But think about that for a second: We don't need 64 bit for our mobile phones. We do nothing on them we couldn't find ways to shoehorn into a 32bit address space for decades to come. But going to 64bit is convenient. It lets us shove 8GB or 16GB RAM or more into future systems and not have to think so much about memory efficiency. So we're going there.
Thus the idea that "humanity will never need more than 64 bits" I think is pretty much ridiculous, because it puts things on its head: It's not that we will "need" it, but that we will easily find ways of making use of it if we can. E.g. direct addressing all your storage is convenient in all kinds of ways. Storing all your home videos uncompressed, unedited, in 8K resolutions, in 3D, at a higher frame rate, becomes convenient when there's enough storage. Being able to write apps that can mmap multi PB monstrosity video projects instead of worrying about disk buffering becomes convenient when it's possible to do it.
It's not that long since I used to consider databases of a few hundred MB big. Now I throw around multi GB databases on a daily basis, and I know they are small for a lot of people, who deal with individual databases in the TB or PB size without blinking.