On Sun, 30 Jan 2011 17:39:45 +0100, Leen Besselink said:
On 01/25/2011 11:06 PM, Owen DeLong wrote:
"640k ought to be enough for anyone."
Remember that when this apocryphal statement was allegedly made in 1981, IBM mainframes and Crays and the like were already well in to the 64-256M of RAM area, and it was intended to apply to consumer-class machines (like what you'd run Windows on).
If IPv4 is like 640k, then, IPv6 is like having 47,223,664,828,696,452,136,959 terabytes of RAM. I'd argue that while 640k was short sighted, I think it is unlikely we will see machines with much more than a terabyte of RAM in the lifetime of IPv6.
I would be very careful with such predictions. How about 2 TB of RAM ?:
OK. A petabyte of ram instead. Better? Then IPv6 is like having 47,223,664,828,696,452,136 petabytes of RAM. Or go to an exabyte of ram. That's a million times the current highest density and still leaves you a bunch of commas in the number. We seem to be managing at best, at the bleeding edge, one comma per decade. And note that the change in units from kbytes to terabytes itself hides 3 more commas. In any case, the fact you can stick a terabyte of RAM into a 4U Dell rack mount that sucks a whole lot of power doesn't mean we're anywhere near being able to do it for consumer-class hardware. Remember, much of the growth is going to be in the embedded and special purpose systems - the smart phone/PDA/handheld game system arena, etc. How many fully loaded R910's will Dell sell, and how many iPhones will Apple sell? How long before a Blackberry or an iPhone has a terabyte of RAM? (For that matter, when will they get to a terabyte of SSD capacity?)