256-bit computing

In computer architecture, 256-bit integers, memory addresses, or other data units are those that are 256 bits (32 octets) wide.

Already 2128 (for 128-bit addressing) would greatly exceed the total data stored on Earth as of 2018, which has been estimated to be around 33.3 ZBs (over 274 bytes).

Some buses on the newer System on a chip (e.g. Tegra developed by Nvidia) utilize 64-bit, 128-bit, 256-bit, or higher.

However, these processors do not operate on individual numbers that are 256 binary digits in length, only their registers have the size of 256-bits.

[4][5] The DARPA funded Data-Intensive Architecture (DIVA) system incorporated processor-in-memory (PIM) 5-stage pipelined 256-bit datapath, complete with register file and ALU blocks in a "WideWord" processor in 2002.