what are 32 and 64-bits in computers and what difference do they make?

Question

Does it make the computer faster? And how are they different from 8 and 16-bit video game consoles?

In: 2446

Answer 1

Well, 8 bit gives you 2 ^ 8 = 256 unique values. If you use these as byte addresses, you can only address 256 bytes. 2 ^ 16 gives you 65,536 bytes which was a massive upgrade.

32 bit allows you to address 4 gigabytes, so this is effectively your maximum RAM size. 64 bit allows us to smash through that limit.