Since 2005 Microsoft has offered both a 32-bit and 64-bit version of its Windows operating system.
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What is a bit?
For three bits, you have three binary digits and 8 possible values and so on.
At 32-bits, you have 232possible combinations or 4,294,967,296 possible values.
With 64 bits, there are a total of 18,446,744,073,709,551,616 possible values.
32-bit limitations
On their own, both these numbers are impressive but dont really mean anything.
A 32bit-CPU is only capable of using 32-bit registers to store data and processing 32-bit values.
The main limitation of a 32-bit CPU is the amount of RAM it can support.
Tip: GiB means Gibibytes.
For example, one kilogram is 1000 grams and one kibibyte is 1024 bytes.
Four gibibytes is 4 x 1024 x 1024 x 1024 bytes, or4,294,967,296 bytes.
Tip: A pebibyte and exbibyte are (roughly) a million and a billion gibibytes respectively.
Roughly because these are increases in binary so theyre really in multiples of 1024 rather than 1000.
So, the exact numbers would be 1,048,576 and 1,073,741,824 gibibytes respectively.
All consumer-orientated 64-bit CPUs and operating systems support running 32-bit applications without any changes being required.
So, you dont need to worry about software compatibility in almost all cases.
In the real world, a 64-bit CPU is no faster than a 32-bit CPU for most users.
