The difference between 32-bit and 64-bit.
In: Technology
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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