>>>128-bit OS won't be commonly available for at least 20-30 years, that's my prediction. Too little profit both money wise and performance wise, way too high cost.
>>
>>20-30 years is a looong period for IT. I used 8 bit computers 25 years ago.
>
>The difference between 64-bit and 128-bit is far, far bigger than most people may realize. The garbage collection on a 128-bit processor will take most of it's power, that's one of the main reasons why the benefit is not going to make it worthwhile for a lot of years. Another thing is that the yield, meaning how many of the produced processors will actually work, also will be very low, meaning that the price will be astronomical.

GC comment - ???

What we might call "wide" processors have been around for quite a while - look up the history of VLIW architectures. Fairly recently there were the Transmeta Crusoe/Efficeon processors.

Some would argue engineering a wide off-chip bus would be more difficult that working wide on-chip, and some current GPUs have 512-bit memory buses.