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We'd be better off with 9-bit bytes

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Re: We'd be better off with 9-bit bytes

#71

Post by labrador »

svachalek wrote: post #66
labrador wrote: post #53

At the end: "Thank you to GPT 4o and o4 for discussions, research, and drafting." At first I thought that was a nice way to handle credit, but on further thought I wonder if this is necessary because the base line assumption is that everyone is using LLMs to help them write.

As soon as that's my baseline assumption, I think I'm done with the internet. I can get LLM slop on my own.

I thought the article was well written. I'm assuming the author did most of the writing because it didn't sound like AI slop. I also assume he meant he uses AI to assist, not as the main driver.

Re: We'd be better off with 9-bit bytes

#72

Post by bigstrat2003 »

dmitrygr wrote: post #38
bigstrat2003 wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That might've been better, actually. The author makes the mistake of "more time would've made this better", but we've had plenty of time to transition to IPv6. People simply don't because they are lazy and IPv4 works for them. More time wouldn't help that, any more than a procrastinating student benefits when the deadline for a paper gets extended. But on the other hand, if we had run out sooner , perhaps IPv4 wouldn…

> simply don't because they are lazy and IPv4 works for them Or because IPv6 was not a simple "add more bits to address" but a much larger in-places-unwanted change.

I've run IPv6 on both corporate and home networks. Whether or not the additions were merited, they are not a formidable challenge for any reasonably-skilled admin. So no, I don't think that the reason you gave suffices as an excuse for why so many still refuse to deploy IPv6.

Re: We'd be better off with 9-bit bytes

#73

Post by pratyahava »

svachalek wrote: post #61
relevant_stats wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really don't get why some people like to pollute conversations with LLMs answers. Particularly when they are as dumb as your example. What's the point?

Same, we all have access to the LLM too, but I go to forums for human thoughts.

ok, agree with your point, i should have got the numbers from chatgpt and just put them in the comment with my words, i was just lazy to calculate how much profit we would have with 10-bit bytes.

Re: We'd be better off with 9-bit bytes

#74

Post by AlotOfReading »

pratyahava wrote: post #24
smallstepforman wrote: post #19

The elephant in the room nobody talks about is silicon cost (wires, gates, multiplexirs, AND and OR gates etc). With a 4th lane, you may as well go straight to 16 bits to a byte.

This must be the real reason of using 8-bit. But then why did they make 9-bit machine instead of 16-bit?

The original meaning of byte was a variable number of bits to represent a character, joined into a larger word that reflected the machine's internal structure. The IBM STRETCH machines could change how many bits per character. This was originally only 1-6 bits [1] because they didn't see much need for 8 bit characters and it would have forced them to choose 64 bit words, when 60 bit words was faster and cheaper. A few months later they had a change of heart after considering how addressing interacted with memory paging [2] and added support for 8 bit bytes for futureproofing and 64 bit words, which became dominant with the 360.

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20170404160423/http://archive.co...

[2] https://web.archive.org/web/20170404161611/http://archive.co...

Re: We'd be better off with 9-bit bytes

#75

Post by brudgers »

I'm writing this on a four-year-old Macbook Pro and it only has 16 GB of RAM. Server-class machines would still need to address more memory than that, but they're usually running specialized software or virtualizing; databases and hypervisors are already tricky code and segmentation wouldn't be the end of the world.

Because, I have a ten year old Dell laptop with 40GB of RAM, 16GB seems like an arbitrary limitation, an engineering compromise, or something like that.

I don’t see how it is a result of 8 bit bytes because 64bits has a lot of address space.

And because my laptop is running Windows 10 currently and ram Ubuntu before that, ordinary operating systems are sufficient.

—-

Also ECC RAM is 9 bits per byte.

Re: We'd be better off with 9-bit bytes

#76

Post by kyralis »

"We've guessed wrong historically on data sizes, and if we had 9 bit bytes those guesses (if otherwise unchanged) would have been less wrong, so 9 bit bytes would be better!" is an extremely tenuous argument. Different decisions would have been made.

We need to be better at estimating require sizes, not trying to trick ourselves into accomplishing that by slipping in an extra bit to our bytes.

Re: We'd be better off with 9-bit bytes

#77

Post by pratyahava »

relevant_stats wrote: post #49
pratyahava wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

deleted

I really don't get why some people like to pollute conversations with LLMs answers. Particularly when they are as dumb as your example. What's the point?

umm, i guess most of the article is made by llm, so i did not see it as a sin, but for other cases i agree, copy-pasting from llm is crap

Re: We'd be better off with 9-bit bytes

#78

Post by skissane »

falcor84 wrote: post #68
duskwuff wrote: post #17

Non-power-of-2 sizes are awkward from a hardware perspective. A lot of designs for e.g. optimized multipliers depend on the operands being divisible into halves; that doesn't work with units of 9 bits. It's also nice to be able to describe a bit position using a fixed number of bits (e.g. 0-7 in 3 bits, 0-31 in 5 bits, 0-63 in 6 bits), e.g. to represent a number of bitwise shift operations, or to select a bit from a…

We just need 3 valued electronics

The Soviets had ternary computers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Setun

Then they decided to abandon their indigenous technology in favour of copying Western designs

Re: We'd be better off with 9-bit bytes

#79

Post by Nevermark »

1 extra (literally) odd bit would require a lot of changes...

What if instead of using single bytes, we used "doublebytes"?

8-bit software continues to work, while new 16-bit "doublebyte" software gets 256x the value capacity, instead of a meager 2x.

Nobody will ever need more byte space than that!

Without requiring any changes to CPU/GPU, RAM, SSD, Ethernet, WiFi ...

Magic. :)

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