What's the difference between a Win7 32-bit system and a 64-bit system?

First of all, I believe that the choice of 64-bit WINDOWS7 users in a large proportion of memory is greater than or equal to 4GB. Under 32-bit Windows7, it is possible to show that memory can be used 3.25G, which makes many netizens feel uneasy. Yes, addressable memory space is indeed the most notable feature of the 32-bit WINDOWS7 and 64-bit Windows7.

The 32-bit CPU, which is precisely the CPU running in 32-bit mode, can only address up to 4GB of memory, and the 32-bit operating system can only recognize the maximum 4GB of memory, because there are many storage devices in the system, in addition to memory, The amount of memory that is really available is certainly less than 4GB, which is the 3.xxG shown in the system properties that we see.

However, the 64-bit CPU has changed a lot, the 64-bit CPU's maximum addressing space is 2 of the 64-square bytes, the calculation of its addressable space reached an astonishing 16TB (treabytes), that is, 16384GB. Of course, this is only the theory, from the actual application, the Windows764bit versions are 8GB-192GB, which, the family version can support 8GB memory, the family Advanced Edition can support 16GB memory, and 64-bit WINDOWS7 Professional Edition, The enterprise and flagship versions support up to 192GB of RAM.

That is, a user with a memory greater than 4GB is limited by 32-bit hardware and therefore cannot maximize hardware resources, which makes it necessary to install a 64-bit operating system to maximize resource utilization.

Note that the 64-bit system requires 64-bit CPU support, before installing 64-bit Windows7, please confirm that your CPU supports 64 bits, in general, the CPU purchased 2006 years later supports 64-bit mode.

If this is the only consideration, 32-bit Windows7 is more suitable for users with less than 4GB of memory because the 64-bit version consumes more system memory resources and is counterproductive.

Next, we'll consider the operational performance.

Theoretically, the performance of the 64-bit platform is much higher than the 32-bit platform. The reason is in the data bit width with the CPU General register, the 64-bit platform is 64-bit, and the 32-bit platform is 32-bit, that is, 64-bit data commands can be run by the processor, which can fetch 64 bits of data at a time (as long as 64 instructions, and two bytes at a time), than 8 bits (requires 32 instructions, Extracting 4 bytes of data at a time is one step higher, and the theoretical performance will increase 1 time times accordingly.

But running 32-bit apps under 64-bit Windows7 doesn't make you feel a leap in performance, only 64-bit apps can maximize the 64-bit platform's advantage. But it's easy to see that 64-bit apps are now well below the 32-bit platform in the number of categories, but happily, more and more software developers are porting their software to 64-bit platforms.

From the above we can see that the choice of 32-bit system or 64-bit system is not a factor can be determined, we need to take into account the various factors, combined with their own applications and hardware of the actual situation, make a choice.