We had 64-bit, yes. What about second 64-bit?
Résumé
High-performance architectures are increasingly heterogeneous and incorporate often specialized hardware. We have first seen the generalization of GPUs in the most powerful machines, followed by FPGAs, and now by many other accelerators such as Tensor Processor Units (TPUs) for Deep Neural Networks, or variable precision FPUs. Recent hardware manufacturing trends make it very likely that specialization will not only persist, but increase. Manually managing this heterogeneity is complex and not maintainable. We therefore propose to revisit how we design both hardware and OS in order to better hide the heterogeneity. To ensure long term viability of our proposal, we propose to entertain the use of 128-bit addressing.
