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> Why Hasn't Anyone Created A 128-Bit Operating System Yet (Microsoft Or Linux)?
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Why hasn't anyone created a 128-bit operating system yet (Microsoft or Linux)?
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Because there are basically no mainstream, general-purpose 128-bit CPUs. And there aren't because there aren't many problems that need such a large address space (2^128) or numbers of that size. Where you need to operate with integers or floats of that size, you can add suitable 128-bit instructions, without the need to design an entire CPU around that word size
Wherever you need to operate with integers or floats of that size, you can add suitable 128-bit instructions, without the need to design an entire CPU around that word size.
Bill Gates' famous phrase, when MS-DOS was launched with the IBM-PC.
Who could need more than 640K of memory? That was the physical addressing limit of the 8086, with its 16 bits.
As many answers indicate, doing so would be a waste of time and resources for a laptop or desktop PC, but imagine for a supercomputer, it would be really fantastic, in such a computer it would take full advantage of 128 bits, so if there is hope
Because you don't need it. CPUs, absolutely all of them, run at a maximum of 64 bits, because that's enough to address 4TB of RAM.
Do you know when we're going to need more than 4TB of RAM? Possibly in about 20 years or more.
I think the wave is more about parallelism and on-demand process management. Of adding and managing process in parallel, rather than having more or less addressability of a single processor. Well, that seems to me.
Because there is no need to build it. 64 bits is more than enough to represent the data in memory with the computational processing we have today. 128 bits would be overkill and without taking into account the amount of labour and hours it would take to create an operating system that supports 128 bits. No application would fully utilise them and in short it would be a waste of time.
The main reason to create a 128-bit operating system is because there is a processor that has that same amount 128 pins and that same capacity in RAM.
A 32-bit O.S. can address in a single cycle 2^32 = 4 GB RAM
A 64-bit O.S. can address in a single cycle 2^64 = 18,446,000,000 GB
That would be a huge and very expensive research and development effort that no one or very few will ever need, so the idea of multi-core processors has been developed more and more, multiple processors within a single processor, so that different tasks can be assigned to each processor.
Now we all use our laptops and mobile phones for several simultaneous tasks, it is more useful to have multitasking capacity than to be able to access 18 billion GB of RAM
Where 128-bit processors are found are in professional video cards or for advanced gamers, where more than memory addressing is used to obtain very large numbers, but in these specific cases a 128-bit O.S. is not required.
It would be very good as you put it, however operating systems depend on the processor. At present, either the old 32-bit or the new (not so much any more) 64-bit. When we have the 128-bit processor I have no doubt that we will have the 128-bit OS with the goodness that you have indicated.