Oh for fuck sake, I replied to a bot.

To the dev that’s spamming Lemmy with this garbage: You aren’t making Lemmy better. You’re actively making it a worse experience.

Imagine we have an 8 bit (1 byte) architecture, so data is stored/processed in 8-bit chunks.

If our RAM holds 256 bits, we can store 32 pieces of data in that RAM (256/8).

If we change to a 16 bit architecture, that same physical RAM now only has the capacity to hold 16 values (256/16). The values can be significantly bigger, but we get less of them.

Bits don’t appear out of nothing, they do take physical space, and there is a cost to creating them. We have a tradeoff of the number of values to store vs the size of each value.

For reference, per chunk (or “word”) of data:
With 8 bits, we can hold 256 values.
With 64 bits, we can hold 18,446,744,100,000,000,000 values.
With 128 bits, we can hold 3,402,823,670,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 values.
(For X bits, it’s 2^X)

Maybe one day we’ll get there, but for now, 64 bits seems to be enough for at least consumer-grade computations.

I’ll answer your question with a question: What are doing that requires 128-bit computations?

After that, a follow up question: Is it so important you’re willing to cut your effective RAM in half to do it?

I’m not going to patronize you like the other comments here, but I do want to warn you to be careful with the whole “World War 3 is coming and the economy will crash” stuff.

It’s easy to say the world is ending, and that’s why do many people say it, but in reality very very few of them are ever right. You’ll live a much happier life as an optimist, and you’ll be just as prepared for the worst (if not more) by simply living your best life without stressing over some hypothetical societal collapse.

Besides, on the topic of cell phones: the first thing likely to be disrupted in a large scale war is internet/cell phone service. If you really do want to choose to live in fear, what you want is a HAM Radio, not a cell phone.

Edit: I guess I never really answered the question. My opinion is that if you can get away with not having a cell phone, hold onto that as long as you can. Smartphones are cool and useful, but they have their drawbacks too, and once you have one, it’s very hard to go back. Not saying don’t get one, but realize that you’ve still got a whole lifetime to be tethered to it, so no rush.