That exchange is quite a good prediction all things considered.

> Note that "minor" implementation issues like die space, routing, and gate delays, especially of 128-bit adders & shifters are non-trivial, so people aren't going to rush out and build 128-bitters for fun, just as people matched timing dates of their 64-bitters to their expected markets.

I think we're stuck with 64 bit for quite a while. The circuit size jump from 64 bit to 128 bit is significant. There's no fixed scalar or apples to apples comparison (that I'm aware of). Just for adders though, 2 bits requires 2 full adders, 4 bits requires 4 adders, 8 requires 8, etc.

Another way to look at this is that 16 bit gives addressable memory up to 65k, and quite a few programs had to deal with paging in architectures like the 8086/8088. 32 bits gave us up to 4GB addressable memory, and not it's now not uncommon that a program such as a web browser exceeds this. 64 bits would give us up to 18 exabytes of addressable memory. I'm not aware of any common programs breaking into the terabyte category (even in most research), let alone petabyte and then exabyte.

Even iterating over that many numbers becomes a large computational task. Just a quick test program:

    // gcc -O3 count.c -o count
    #include <stdint.h>
    int main(){
      uint64_t z = 0;
      for(uint64_t i = 0; i < UINT64_MAX; i++) z += i;
      return (int)(z % 2);
    }

Using uint32_t and UINT32_MAX, it returns almost instantly. For uint64_t and UINT64_MAX you will be waiting a long time. 128 bit values? Even longer. Maybe many many cores could break that memory up, but then it makes sense to have a 64 bit system with some kind of ability to occasionally change page.