Comparing 32 and 64-bit systems

Many have heard of the exis­tence of two main types of oper­at­ing sys­tems. At some point, every­one has a need to choose a cer­tain one. How not to make a mis­take and choose the right option? In gen­er­al, what are the dif­fer­ences between 32 and 64-bit sys­tems? Let’s take a clos­er look at the issue with our experts.

A few words about the bitness of the operating system and its definition

In sim­ple terms, bit­ness is the ver­sion of the oper­at­ing sys­tem that is suit­able for work­ing with a par­tic­u­lar proces­sor (32 or 64-bit archi­tec­ture). So, it is now nec­es­sary to under­stand the intri­ca­cies of the device of the cen­tral proces­sor unit of com­put­er devices.

Of course, this ele­ment is the main one in any hard­ware. In fact, it is an inte­grat­ed cir­cuit that exe­cutes all machine codes. Per­haps one of the most impor­tant char­ac­ter­is­tics of the proces­sor is its archi­tec­ture — a design that is com­pat­i­ble with a num­ber of com­mands.

And the bit depth of an ele­ment is its “abil­i­ty” to work imme­di­ate­ly with a large set of infor­ma­tion or data units, that is, a bit. Their num­ber deter­mines the proces­sor reg­is­ter — a repos­i­to­ry of infor­ma­tion to which you need to have access.

The difference in the operation of systems of excellent bit depth

So we come to the main ques­tion: what is the dif­fer­ence between OS 32 and 64-bit? Let’s take every­thing in order. Exter­nal­ly, these sys­tems, of course, can­not be dis­tin­guished. But here the pro­duc­tiv­i­ty of the devices is dif­fer­ent. Since a 64-bit reg­is­ter is more capa­cious for input infor­ma­tion, an oper­at­ing sys­tem with this archi­tec­ture gives all appli­ca­tions on the device a “green light” to use a large amount of oper­at­ing mem­o­ry.

For most oper­at­ing sys­tems, the best option is a 64-bit sys­tem. The same can­not be said about the Win­dows XP ver­sion (when com­bined with a 64-bit OS, there will cer­tain­ly be prob­lems with the dri­vers). So, let’s con­sid­er how good the 64-bit ver­sion is com­pared to the 32-bit ver­sion:

1. A com­put­er device per­forms all cal­cu­la­tions very quick­ly — a unit with a 64-bit oper­at­ing sys­tem is high­ly pro­duc­tive. Actu­al­ly, this advan­tage in the oper­a­tion of 64-bit sys­tems com­pared to 32-bit sys­tems is unde­ni­able.

2. The sys­tem has aux­il­iary pro­tec­tion — this is the so-called “DEP” pro­tec­tion, which affects not only the soft­ware (as is usu­al­ly the case with 32-bit), but also the hard dri­ve. An uncon­di­tion­al plus, but at the same time, the antivirus pro­gram has not both­ered any­one yet.

3. A wide vari­ety of addi­tion­al soft­ware — the poten­tial of the oper­at­ing sys­tem with 64 bits is almost unlim­it­ed — thanks to the vari­ety of periph­er­al soft­ware adapt­ed to it. Now most pro­grams and com­put­er games are effec­tive­ly oper­at­ed only in 64-bit OS.

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5. Extend­ed bit depth for some devices is bad because it may not be com­pat­i­ble with a num­ber of dri­vers (in par­tic­u­lar, this applies to those that were devel­oped specif­i­cal­ly for a 32-bit OS, as well as some print­ers, already out­dat­ed plu­g­ins for Pho­to­shop, Fire­fox, etc.).

Which one should be preferred?

When choos­ing an OS of suit­able bit­ness, it is nec­es­sary to take into account, first of all, the con­fig­u­ra­tion of the device, the type of proces­sor, the amount of RAM. So, if an x86-64 proces­sor is installed, and the amount of mem­o­ry exceeds 4 GB, 64-bit is prefer­able — this will improve the per­for­mance of the sys­tem as a whole.

If you install a 32-bit OS on a 64-bit CPU, and even with large RAM, you will not be able to use the advan­tages of the device 100%, since such an OS will be able to process less than 4 GB of mem­o­ry — the effi­cien­cy of the proces­sor will decrease.

ON A NOTE. The use of a 32-bit OS with more than 4 GB of RAM is accept­able if the proces­sor fre­quen­cy does not exceed 2.4 GHz.

By the way, 32-bit soft­ware is “friend­ly” to the x64 oper­at­ing sys­tem — it func­tions nor­mal­ly, com­bined with a dif­fer­ent per­for­mance lev­el. And final­ly, one point: if you decide to change the bit­ness of the OS, it will not be super­flu­ous to find out that in this case a com­plete rein­stal­la­tion of the sys­tem will be required — that is, for­mat­ting the disk.