On: The IBM Pentium 4 64-Bit CPU

[simonh]

To put it another way it's not just enough to count the grains on sand on a beach, it's enough to count all the atoms in all the grains of sand on planet Earth. Give or take a few orders of magnitude[1].

[1]https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/2205:_Types_of_Ap...

[exikyut → simonh]

$ echo '2^128' | bc | rev | sed 's/.../&,/g;s/,$//' | rev

340,282,366,920,938,463,463,374,607,431,768,211,456

...rrright.

Actually let me line up the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orders_of_magnitude_(data)

  340,282,366,920,938,463,463,374,607,431,768,211,456
          ..  ??  YB  ZB  EB  PB  TB  GB  MB  KB

(There's no meaningful notation of size here - the denotations are just to show just how much data you can fit in 128 bits of space.)

Blinks a few times

Ultimately fails to mentally grasp and make useful sense of the number due to its sheer size

As an aside, apparently DNA can store a few TB/PB (I don't remember which). The age of optimizing for individual bytes as a routine part of "good programming" is definitely over, I guess. (I realize this discussion is about address space and not capacity, but still)