That's just it, because a lot of people still run in 32bit (even if the hardware has been 64bit since the later models of Pentium IVs), the devs have to keep the two versions very similar and will not really take advantage of the wider data path until a large majority have made the move.
Then programmers will be able to make bigger programs.
Remember the days of 16bit ? The 286, 386 ?
Programs were quite a bit smaller then, with an address space of 2 to the 16th power being 64K on the 8088, the first PCs. The 286 and 386 had a bigger space of 1MB, or 20bit of address space.
So to recap,
16bit: 64KB of memory
32bit: 4GB
64bit: 18.4 X 10^9 GB or about 18.4 Giga GB or 18.4 Exabytes
18.4EB is a big number, I wonder when we will go 128 !
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Last edited by louisv; 09-04-2011 at 01:04 PM.
Reason: Small error
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