32 bits vs 64 bits

There are so often that we heard people mentioned about 32 bits OS and 64 bits OS. A lot of people ask me what is the difference between the two. After umpteen times of answering that, I finally decided to put it on below.

A 64 bits OS is optimized to run program that made full use of 64 bit processor whereas 32 bits OS or 32 bits program does not made use of the power 64 bits processor provided for.

To explain things further, a 32 bit processor can process 32 bits of information per clock cycle, on an AMD Athlon 64 3400+ at 2.4Ghz there are 2.4 billion clock cycles per second. A 64 bit processor can process 64 bits of information per clock cycle, effectively doubling the speed of the processor. In the real world you won't see a double in speed because there are other limiting factors to speed such as hard drive, memory, and motherboard architecture speeds. You should see a very noticable increase in speed with 64 bit operating systems and software. Computer systems running 32 bit processors can only handle 4Gb of memory. However, Microsoft Windows OS may not display the full 4GB.

64 bit processors can handle 16 exabytes of memory (that's over 16 billion gigabytes). Not a big deal now unless you are working with very large files, such as large video files. As a side note, Unix and Linux already have well developed 64 bit Operating systems as 64 bit processors have been around for a while, just not for the desktop world.