What’s the difference, and will we one day have 128bit systems?
In: Technology
When CPUs process an instruction such as “add” or “move” it needs to know where the number(s) that will be added or moved are located in memory. Therefore, every location in memory needs to be given some kind of identifier. Bytes are the smallest unit that pretty much all modern computers operate on, so every location a byte can be stored needs to be assigned an ID. The number of bits of the operating system/CPU is the number of bits that these IDs are. 32 bits can represent 4,294,967,296 numbers, which is why 32-bit Windows can’t make use of more than 4GB of RAM. 64 bits can represent 2.3 exabytes. So until we have computers that we’re putting that much RAM into, we won’t need a 128-bit system.
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