Re:Yep... (Score 1)

The original UNIX clock counted seconds. That was always much too coarse, so BSD soon introduced a clock in microseconds. A 64-bit count of microseconds would wrap around in 584,542 years. That's probably long enough.

But is a microsecond small enough? GPS pseudorange accuracies are typically a few meters, so GPS timing is already good to ten to a few tens of nanoseconds. Future systems will undoubtedly do better, especially if atomic clocks become cheap and small enough to be standard PC motherboard items.

A 64-bit count of nanoseconds would wrap around in 584.5 years. Is that too soon?

A compromise would be 10ns counts, wrapping around in 5845 years. That would be a good match to current GPS timing precision.

Maybe we should jump right to a 128 bit count of femtoseconds. That would wrap around at about a million times the age of the universe.