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Thursday, 11 March 2010
We're all aware of the inexorable march of computer technology, processors continue to get faster, as do graphics cards, memory increases, hard disks are getting positively huge (capactity wise anyway) and of course new software is released with ever more capability. But in all the clamour surrounding the release of new technology many people aren't aware of a technology which has been around for many years but is only now gaining more traction and dare I say more relevance.
That technology is 64 bit operating systems, in the Windows world there has been a 64 bit version since Windows XP but few installed it. But with the release of Windows 7 many more people are opting for the 64 bit version. You may be wondering why that should be? Put simply a 64 bit operating system can address a lot more memory than a 32 bit operating system and as the need for faster machines with more memory increases so does the need for users to opt for a 64 bit OS.
To explain further we need to touch on the fundamentals of how computers work. We all know that computers are 'digital' which means that they represent everything (data and instructions) as a binary number. But binary is a pretty limited numbering system, you can only have 0 or 1 and so to represent bigger numbers you need to add more 0s and 1s. In computer terminology a single binary space that can represent 0 or 1 is known as a bit, 8 bits together are known as a byte which can represent numbers between 0 and 255.
When accessing memory a computer will lookup an 'address' which describes the location of the data, much like your address describes your location. These addresses have to be represented as a number, so relying solely on 8 bits would make for a pretty limited computer (although the first ones did). That's why computers evolved to 16 bit addressing which gave a maximum of 65,536 unique addresses (or 64 kilobytes). That was fine for a while (the 70s and 80s mostly) but as software capability evolved so did the need for more memory which led to the development of 32 bit processors which could address up to 4,294,967,295 unique addresses (or 4 Gigabytes).
That's a large number and has (and still is) certainly been enough for most of us as technology has evolved. We've slowly moved from computers with less than a megabyte (1,024,000 bytes) of memory in the early nineties to computers with more than a gigabyte today. At the moment it's still true that that 4 gigabyte limit is sufficient, computers with 2 Gb or 3 Gb of memory are more than capable of meeting most users needs. But there is a small but ever increasing number of users for whom the 4 Gb memory limit has become increasingly troublesome, this is particularly true for those who regularly work with large amounts of data such as when video editing. That is why in the early part of the new century 64 bit processors were developed. 64 bits represents a truly huge number (264) and is more memory than anyone could conceivably need, but importantly it removes the 4 Gb memory limit and allows people to make full use of a 4 Gb computer (system & video memory borrows memory from the last Gb) and also have the option of specifying even more, for instance computers with 8 Gb+ of memory are starting to become ever more common.
But to make use of that 64 bit address space the operating system needs to work on the computer as a native 64 bit process, hence why we now have the option of purchasing either 32 bit or 64 bit Windows!