Exponential numbers

A bit nerdy but the current system used by the internet can only handle 2³² addresses; the new system that's supposed to be coming into use can handle 2¹²⁸. So it's a difference of 96 so what?

Well the first system can handle 4,294,967,296 addresses and the second 340,282,366,920,938,463,463,374,607,431,768,211,456 addresses.

To put it another way if we wanted to assign an address to a grain of rice the first system could handle a volume of rice contained in a cube roughly 7m to a side. For the second we'd need a cube roughly 29 million km to a side that's about 18,000 Sun's.

Kind of a big difference :-)

Just to check my figures assume a grain of rice at 0.075cm³
Multiply by 2¹²⁸ equals 2.55x10³⁷cm³
Equals 2.55x10²²km³
Cube root equals 29,441,973km
Volume of Sun equals 1.41x10¹⁸km³
Divide larger by smaller results in 18,074.