Why would we ever need 128-bit CPUs? I remember the PS2 had something like that (with details and caveats I don't understand), but subsequent games consoles went back to a more usual register size: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/128-bit_computing
All I know is we keep having this issue with saying "nah, this is it. Nobody will ever need more than this." And then inevitably the time comes when we need more.
Back in the 80s, 16 bit programmers knew that 32 bit code was coming, so they carefully crafted the code to be portable to 32 bits.
Of course, none of it worked on 32 bit machines because the programmers had never written 32 bit code before and did the portability measures all wrong.
We used to call 16-bytes a paragraph, so the nostalgic geek in me would love to see ‘para’ catch on. I never thought I’d be slinging around whole paragraphs of memory in registers!
Or, you know, we could just name them all by bit length and completely future-proof this system.