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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.
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.