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vayliantoday at 4:38 PM2 repliesview on HN

Those general purpose registers will also need to grow to twice their size, once we get our first 128bit CPU architecture. I hope Intel is thinking this through.


Replies

SAI_Peregrinustoday at 5:30 PM

That's a ways out. We're not even using all bits in addresses yet. Unless they want hardware pointer tagging a la CHERI there's not going to be a need to increase address sizes, but that doesn't expose the extra bits to the user.

Data registers could be bigger. There's no reason `sizeof int` has to equal `sizeof intptr_t`, many older architectures had separate address & data register sizes. SIMD registers are already a case of that in x86_64.

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rwmjtoday at 5:17 PM

There's a first time for everything.