Differences between 32-bit and 64-bit operating systems

Simply put, x86 represents a 32-bit operating system x64 represents a 64-bit operating system. If your CPU is more than two cores, it certainly supports 64-bit operating systems. If your computer has more than 4G of memory, it will use a 64-bit system, because 32-bit Windows 7 or Vista, the largest only support 3.25G of memory. The maximum of 64-bit Windows 7 will support 128G of memory.

There are two main advantages of 64bit computing: A larger range of integer operations can be performed, and larger memory can be supported.

It is not possible to simply assume that the performance of a 64bit processor is twice times the performance of a 32bit processor because of a digital change. In fact, in 32bit applications, 32bit processor performance even stronger, even the 64bit processor, the current situation is also under the 32bit application performance is stronger. So to recognize the advantages of 64bit processor, but not superstitious 64bit.

Memory This is the most significant advantage of a 64-bit system that can use more than 4GB of memory. Most new desktops and laptops have at least 4GB of memory. The problem is that the 32-bit version, like Vista and Win 7, can only be about 3GB of memory. In contrast, 64-bit Windows can take advantage of up to 192GB of memory and can use a memory map that replaces the BIOS's capabilities, allowing the operating system to actually use the full 4GB. Therefore, if you install Win7 x64, you will not waste 1GB of memory for a machine with 4GB of memory.

Personally, 3GB is not enough for everyday applications just a matter of time. An example is the XP mode feature of Win 7, which allows you to run a virtual machine in Windows XP with the old app. This feature can be used for a variety of purposes, such as running Office 2007 and Office 2003 on the same computer, or IE (useful for web development). However, WinXP mode requires at least 512MB~1GB memory to function properly, so XP mode eats memory very much. So if you deploy Windows 7 32-bit now, then you may soon have to move to 64-bit simply because you have to upgrade your machine with new memory. My own laptop has 8GB of memory, because the program that I have developed can run in every virtual machine environment. I don't want to waste every single byte of memory.

64 bit really provides better performance.

I guess a lot of people think 64-bit processors are faster than 32-bit processors. Because of the fact that the transition from 8 bits to 16 bits, the transition from 16 to 32 bits does bring some performance gains. Based on the above reasons, it is possible to think that a 64-bit processor can be faster.

In one example, many 32-bit processors support the s*** instruction set, but most programmers do not use them at all, as this prevents computers that do not support these instruction sets from running their compiled programs (E.g.sse2 can make zip compression faster, but none of the 3 most common compression software uses it).

Therefore, only 64-bit programs that have 64-bit optimizations applied will have a performance boost. Unfortunately, most Windows applications do not do this optimization.

But in the last year, a lot of 64-bit applications have been reborn, but don't mistakenly think that they will be faster than the 32-bit version. Because typically, this 64-bit version is made only because the 32-bit version does not work correctly on a 64-bit Windows operating system. However, some of the 64-bit performance-dependent programs, such as Mathematical Computing (E.g.mathlab) and various types of video processing software, or software developers explicitly support 64-bit (e.g.7zip), then the speed may be significantly different than the 32-bit version.

On the other hand, Win64 does not slow down your computer's performance. Although a program similar to the CLR (. NET bottom) makes some calculations that allow 32-bit programs to run on 64-bit systems, it can take more time to logically. However, in practice you will not know the difference. Almost all performance tests demonstrate that in most cases, there is no need to care about performance differences between 64-bit and 32-bit.

Therefore, better CPU performance is not a reason to upgrade to 64-bit. But there is no doubt that this phenomenon is likely to change soon, and the future belongs to 64 people. Over time more and more software vendors will provide a 64-bit version of the program.