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Originally Posted by bamhm182
BTW, WTF is 64 and 32 bit editions? I'm lost there, all I know is I have Windows XP Pro, and there's 4 different versions of Vista...
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Simply things like the word size (how much data the processor can handle at one) is doubled. Meaning, in the simplest of terms, a 2Ghz 64 bit processor has twice the throughput of a 2Ghz 32 bit processor.
It also affects the amount of RAM you can have. In ram each location is give a unique address. In a 32 bit processor these addresses are 32 character strings in binary (ie a 2 bit processor could have 4 locations 00,01,10 and 11)
To find out the maximum addressable memory you do 2^32 which is 4,294,967,296 Bytes.
Divide by 1024 to get Kb then Mb then Gb:
4,194,304 Kb
4,096 Mb
4Gb
So to have more than 4Gb of RAM in a 32 bit machine is pointless because it can't access it.
A 64 bit machine can access up to 16 Petabytes which is 17,179,869,184Gb... which is alot.
A 64 bit operating system simply takes full advantage of the hardware. There are many other differences, the RAM one was just an example.