Is there any functional difference in 32 bit and 64 bit apps apart from the fact that 32 bit os can only run 32 bit apps whereas a 64 bit os can run both 63 and 32 bit versions of apps?
In: 2
32-Bit apps were written to work on a 32-Bit system and 64-Bit apps were written to work on a 64-Bit system.
Many 64-Bit OS work in such a way as to allow 32-Bit apps run on them (because that is easy to do)
The main issue is that in a 32-Bit system you have 32-bits to address the RAM of the computer. this works out to 4 Gigabyte of maximum RAM.
A program that only expect to be able to reach 4 Gigabyte of RAM can easily be made to work on a computer where more is available.
The reverse of that, a program written with the expectations of being able to reach more than 4Gigs of Memory running on a system that has less than 4Gigs gets difficult.
You can install a 32-Bit OS on a computer with a CPU designed for 64-Bit operating systems and you can install a 32-Bit Windows applications on 64-Bit Windows OS.
But not the other direction.
Fun Fact:
Windows 10 no longer has the feature necessary to run old 16-Bit windows apps included by default, not because this would be impossible to build, but because it shouldn’t be needed. You can still make it work though if you really need to for some terrible reason.
Latest Answers