65536 was a lot when I first got into programming, there was also floating point, and then the realization that we don't need to be constrained to 4 bits, 8 bits, 16 bits, 24 bits, 32 bits, 64 bits, 128 bits, two digit years, 640K of RAM, small stack frames, broken memory models and all the other ridiculous limits. Give it a decade and I bet the ~585 year time frame is reduced to a small enough interval where bugs appear. Bet on lots of 64-bit bugs appearing, and a programmer in the future commenting that 128-bits should have been used, and 128-bits will break in the future of that future, and so on.
For me, the biggest bug in the modern x86 chip is ME: a full system that can be turned on, take over everything and eats up valuable core space.
> Give it a decade and I bet the ~585 year time frame is reduced to a small enough interval where bugs appear.
I'm skeptical that much changes in the next decade regarding where 64-bit integers are useful. It's been a long time since there are been meaningful clock frequency increases in commodity CPUs. Even if we had a 100Ghz CPU and we had it increment a register once per clock cycle, we're still talking ~6 years for it to overflow. And, thats assuming a 20+ times increase in clock frequency when clock frequencies have been mostly flat for the last 10 years.
> a programmer in the future commenting that 128-bits should have been used, and 128-bits will break in the future of that future, and so on.
I disagree with this statement. With 128-bits, it becomes difficult (though not impossible) to even come up with things that are numerous enough to be unable to count with that number of bits. That was never the case for 64-bit or smaller integers.
ME is implemented with a tiny Quark processor on the PCH. It doesn't consume any valuable space in the CPU. Every modern non-trivial support ASIC has an embedded processor for housekeeping duty. The problem is how much ME can extend its tendrils into every aspect of a modern PC.
For me, the biggest bug in the modern x86 chip is ME: a full system that can be turned on, take over everything and eats up valuable core space.