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?
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None of the answers so far were ELI5-enough for me.
**THIS IS ELI5.**
You have a street. The street has houses. You’ve got a horde of families who need homes. You need to put the families into the houses. One family per house.
This street (Leprechaun Street) only has 100 houses. The addresses go from 1 Leprechaun Street, to 100 Leprechaun Street.
If you wanted to put more than 100 families onto Leprechaun Street, you’re out of luck. There’s only room for 100! (There’s ways around that, but that’s not important right now).
Now you have Gnome Street elsewhere in town. Gnome street has 200 houses, and the addresses go from 1 to 200. You can put twice as many families on that street, right?
Computer programs need memory, they need places to store data. Every place where memory can be stored, has an address. That address tells the computer WHERE that piece of memory is kept.
Which is better? Having only 100 places where you can store memory? Or 200 places?
A “32-bit” Operating System kind of means that you only have 100 addresses into which you can put a family (or a bit of data in memory). It’s like Leprechaun Street.
A “64-bit” Operating System kind of means you have twice as many addresses into which you can put a family (or a bit of data in memory). It’s like Gnome street.
**SOME APPLICATIONS** only know how to look in addresses 1 to 100. Whoever wrote those applications said to themselves “Well, the street only has 100 addresses, so I won’t bother making my app capable of looking in more than 100 houses for the bit of memory I need”.
Those kinds of applications … well, even if you give them a bigger street with 200 houses, the application only knows how to look in up to 100 houses.
THAT is akin to a 32-bit application. It only knows how to use the “smaller” size of memory that computers had for many years.
**OTHER APPLICATIONS** were written to be smarter. They know how to look in addresses from 1 to 200. Those applications are like 64-bit applications.
Forget what the 32/64 means. Just realize that one kind of application can “access” a greater range of memory than the other … regardless of how much memory you have! The 32-bit one is just too dumb to know how to look beyond 100 Gnome street!
**AGAIN, THIS IS ELI5. There’s a lot left out. A LOT.**
But now you should be able to see that a 64-bit Operating System has “200 houses on its street”, but only a 64-bit application knows how to LOOK in all 200 houses.
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