What is the difference between 32bit and 64bit?

[IsaacDaGrazin]

I know that 64 can handle ALOT more ram (16 billion according to fap) but why?

its literally just double the amount of bits. 

Why can Windows only use 4gbs of ram (32), shouldn't it be able to use 8 billion?

or wait lemme do some math 1x2= 4x2= 8x2=16x2=32x2=64

you see where I'm going here?

edit: I spent my entire time on this post and now I gotta go to school and I'm not even ready Dx 

Edited March 2, 2016 by IsaacDaGrazin

[DrM]

32-bit is 2^32, so 64-bit would be 2*2*2*2*2... 64 times. it ends up around 16 billions or so while 32 bit is stuck at 4 million

[branden_lucero]

because at the time, 4GB of RAM was a theoretical peak that most consumer PCs wouldnt most likely reach (not 100% positive). 4GB was a limit well into the 70s or 80s. look at how long it took to finally reach that capacity in a modern day consumer system: not until the early 2000s. 

[Nineshadow]

2⁶⁴ is a lot bigger than 2³².

[amppi]

32-bit system is limited to 4GB of memory, 64-bit system is limited to 18 EB (exabytes, 1EB = 1million terabytes).

 

I don't see hardware capping that limit quite so soon..

 

As previous posters stated, the calculation is indeed  2⁶⁴ and 2³² rather than 2*64 or 2*32.

 

Here is a graph on the logarithmic scale

[SaladFingers]

44 minutes ago, branden_lucero said:

because at the time, 4GB of RAM was a theoretical peak that most consumer PCs wouldnt most likely reach (not 100% positive). 4GB was a limit well into the 70s or 80s. look at how long it took to finally reach that capacity in a modern day consumer system: not until the early 2000s. 

Actually that is a misconception. 32-bit has nothing to do with RAM limits. It was only Microsoft that had said problem, and only in certain versions of Windows. Windows Server 32-bit, Linux, OS X, all could handle much more than 4gb ram on 32-bit architectures.

[BrightCandle]

7 minutes ago, SaladFingers said:

Actually that is a misconception. 32-bit has nothing to do with RAM limits. It was only Microsoft that had said problem, and only in certain versions of Windows. Windows Server 32-bit, Linux, OS X, all could handle much more than 4gb ram on 32-bit architectures.

32 bit is definitely only 4GB of addressed RAM so any one individual program could not use more than that. However Windows server and Linux could use PAE which was available on some CPUs to allow addressing above the 32 bit limit, so you could run multiple 32 bit programs on the same operating system each would be limited to 4GB but the system could run many of those. It was popular on servers because you could better utilize the hardware but in the consumer space it wasn't so useful.

[SaladFingers]

1 minute ago, BrightCandle said:

32 bit is definitely only 4GB of addressed RAM so any one individual program could not use more than that. However Windows server and Linux could use PAE which was available on some CPUs to allow addressing above the 32 bit limit, so you could run multiple 32 bit programs on the same operating system each would be limited to 4GB but the system could run many of those. It was popular on servers because you could better utilize the hardware but in the consumer space it wasn't so useful.

Right, the only problem was Windows not having the proper paging technique to make use of more memory. The 32-bit vs 64-bit shouldn't change much for that.