Linked by Jordan Spencer Cunningham on Wed 7th Oct 2009 19:15 UTC, submitted by JayDee
Microsoft has been thinking about Windows 8 for a while now even through the production of Windows 7. Some information has been gathered by our friends over at Ars, and all of this said information points to possible 128-bit versions of Windows 8 and definite 128-bit versions of Windows 9. Update: Other technophiles better-versed than I in this whole 64/128-bit business pointed out that it must be for the filesystem (such as ZFS described in this article) rather than the processor and memory scheme.
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Member since:
2005-07-06
Well you already have 128bit registers today in the SSE units. I'm quiet sure that 128bit for integer values wouldn't make sense for the big majority of application (in fact even in 64bit programs most values which are not pointers are still 32bits because that simply saves memory).
There might some uses where 128bit floating or maybe even 128bit integer makes sense. But it would be a minority of applications and the additions would be more like an instruction set extension like SSE is...
This story based on a (now removed!) LinkedIn profile looks very dubious to me. IA-128 is also very odd name. IA-64 is the name for the Intel Itanium architecture which intel isn't developing further in favor of AMD64 (or EM64T like Intel calls it).
And well if you want more bits wait for Larabee - it will have 512 bit registers ;-)