The difference between 32-bit and 64-bit.
In: Technology
imagine you’re adding numbers like in school where you write
1 3 5 3 1 6
0 5 1 2 5 6
_________
1 8 6 5 7 2
That’s how a computer adds numbers too. A computer with “more bits” can work with longer numbers at once.
But more importantly, because it “knows bigger numbers” it can use more storage:
Every tiny bit of storage has an address. The processor shouts the address like a cook in a restaurant kitchen, then the storage with that address gives whatever it had stored.
More storage-addresses is like a Gordon Ramsay who can shout at 64 instead of just 32 different cooks to get him lamb sauce. The storage/cooks still work the same speed each, but a *Rordon Gamsay* who can handle 32 at a time get’s half as much lamb sauce as Gordon 64-bit Ramsay.
Computers process information which is represented using bits (short for binary digit, 0s and 1s). The data is represented as a sequence of such bits. 32 bit and 64 bit simply refers to the *length* of such sequences. Therefore, a 32 bit system uses data that is represented by a sequence of 32 bits. Most systems are now 64 bits, which means that they are able to work with data that is twice as large as 32 bit systems.
Edit: as many people pointed out, my answer wasn’t 100% accurate. Sorry bout that OP
Here’s an explanation which doesn’t use any strange analogies:
The number refers to how many bits there are in special storage locations called registers, which is where the CPU stores the data it’s working on right at this instant. As other posters have said, more bits means you can store bigger numbers in those registers, but being able to do arithmetic very, very quickly on 64-bit numbers instead of 32-bit numbers isn’t why computer makers made the jump. The reason is because CPUs use the data in registers to get data out of memory, so the bigger your registers are, the more memory your system can use.
How much memory are we talking about here? Well, 32-bit numbers top out at 4 GB of RAM. You can only uniquely number something above four billion different objects if you only have 32 bits to work with. Four billion may sound like a lot, but 4 GB is kind of a constraining amount of RAM, even on desktops, these days. With 64 bits, you can uniquely number over [18 quintillion](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/9,223,372,036,854,775,807)* different objects, so that’s the limit of 64-bit addressing. We likely won’t hit that for a while yet.
*(I linked to the right thing. Read the article for the *unsigned* value, and realize that x86-64 isn’t the whole world.)
32 bit is 2^(32) and 64 bit is 2^(64) it refers to the amount that can be ‘addressed’ at any given time. 8 bit is 2^(8) and an 8 bit address has 256 values from 0-255 which is why Pac-Man for example crashes after level 255 it can’t handle another level.
32-bit has an upper level of about 4bn which is why 32-bit computers can only handle a maximum of 4GB of RAM. All systems have multiple routes/connections with different addressing capabilities, the Atari Jaguar being the most infamous, as it had a 32-bit CPU and a 64-bit memory bus and as such was marketed as a 64-bit system.
Let’s say you want to assign a number to every house in the US. There are 125 million households in the US, so we need a 9 digit number to represent them all, because 125,000,000 = 9 digits. Because we’re using 9 digits, there’s an upper limit on the number of households we could ever assign a number to (999,999,999). If we want more than that, we need to add another digit.
In computing, the households are RAM addresses (locations in RAM where we can store things). The CPU can reference these addresses using either a 32 digit number or a 64 digit number. These are binary numbers though, hence we say “bits”. Clearly the 64 bit number is bigger, and can therefore reference far more RAM addresses. This is why 32bit CPUs can only use 4GB of RAM, and 64bit CPUs have a much, much higher upper limit.
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