Re: gnat and heap size

["Dale Pennington" <Dale.K.Pennington@boeing.com>]

You might note, that is one sugar cube was one terrabyte (i.e. 10**12
bytes), then it would take a MegaSugarCube with approximately 262 sugar
cubes to a side to hold 2**64 bytes of data. I am not sure of the dimensions
of a sugar cube, but if one were to assume a 0.25" sugar cube, that would be
be about 5 1/2" per side cube. Note too bad for a fixed site, but a but
large for a laptop.

"Marin David Condic" <dont.bother.mcondic.auntie.spam@[acm.org> wrote in
message news:9ov8a4$b71$1@nh.pace.co.uk...
> Sure. But assuming that if you've got an ability to address 2**64 of
> anything (bytes, sectors, whatever) then there must be something there
> physically you want to retrieve. If its bytes, then you'd need something
> storing the binary states of the bits. Presuming that you had a means of
> detecting some sort of state change in a single atom, then you'd need
2**64
> * 8 (or whatever your byte size is, for those about to observe that a byte
> need not be 8 bits) atoms. That might start approaching something a little
> too big to get into a laptop. :-)
>
> I wouldn't mind having a 64 bit address - it would allow you to dedicate
> whole banks of the address space to various purposes - but actually having
> 2*64 bytes available to address may be just a wee bit beyond current
> technology.
>
> I like holographic memory and remember reading about research on such
> devices several years ago. I'm wondering why it never made it out of the
> lab? Too expensive? Too hard to produce? Too unreliable? Something must
have
> got in its way to the market because its been a long time since I heard
tell
> of the devices working in labs and I don't see any on the shelves at
> CompUSA... Hmmmmm.....
>
> MDC
> --
> Marin David Condic
> Senior Software Engineer
> Pace Micro Technology Americas    www.pacemicro.com
> Enabling the digital revolution
> e-Mail:    marin.condic@pacemicro.com
> Web:      http://www.mcondic.com/
>
>
> "Pascal Obry" <p.obry@wanadoo.fr> wrote in message
> news:ulmj1fyac.fsf@wanadoo.fr...
> >
> > "Marin David Condic" <dont.bother.mcondic.auntie.spam@[acm.org> writes:
> >
> > >  I doubt that it would be practically possible to construct a disk big
> > > enough to hold 2**64 bytes of data as a result. :-)
> >
> > Well well... Somebody said that only 3 or 4 ENIAC would be needed in the
> > world because it was so powerful...
> >
>
>
>