What is Windows bit depth and why is it needed? Windows bit depth: what is x86 and x64

Many users often wonder what the x86 and x64 bitness prefix means in operating systems and programs, and also which bitness is better to choose. Now I will describe in detail all types of bit depth and which OS bit depth is right for you.

Currently exists 2 types of bit depth operating systems, this 32-bit and 64-bit. In the near future, it is possible that 128-bit operating systems and the corresponding hardware for them will appear.

X86 is an older hardware and operating system architecture. 32-bit OS this is the x86 architecture. The architecture itself is used on older computers with single-core processors and a small amount of RAM.

X64- modern architecture for both operating systems and computer hardware. Used on new models of laptops and desktop computers with at least 4 gigabytes of RAM and multi-core processors with a high clock frequency. Operating systems for this type of architecture usually carry the x64 prefix, that is, the so-called 64 bit (bit) OS.

What bit depth should I choose? x86 or x64?

If you have a computer that is not the newest (6-7 years old), has a single-core processor with a frequency of 2 GHz, a gigabyte or 2 of DDR-1 or 2 RAM, a 64 or 128 megabyte video card... on which Windows XP was originally installed, and you decide to install Windows 7, or maybe even 8, on this PC, then of course it is best to choose a 32-bit operating system (x86).

This will be the best option for a computer with approximately the same system characteristics. Otherwise, if you try to install a 64-bit operating system on it, it will either not install at all (if the processor is very old and does not support the x64 architecture, then a window with the corresponding error will be displayed immediately when starting the OS installation), or it will be very slow work and often freeze tightly.

But if the computer has modern characteristics, for example, a 2, 4 or 6 core processor with a clock frequency of at least 2 GHz, at least 4 gigabytes of RAM, a video card of a gigabyte or more, then you simply need to install a 64-bit operating system system! Such an operating system will work much faster, application response will be at the highest level, and the system will not freeze with a large number of tasks.

There are cases when users install a 32-bit OS on a fairly powerful computer, for example, if some application or game on a 64-bit OS is slow. This is not recommended, since on a 32-bit operating system you will not achieve high operating speeds, even if the hardware is powerful enough. Because the 32-bit operating system is more suitable for older PCs.

Moreover, if you have 4 or more gigabytes of RAM installed, then the 32-bit OS (x86) will see only 3 GB and will use them, since it is not designed for a larger amount of memory.

How to find out which OS bit depth on your PC?

You need to type the key combination Win+Pause and in the window that appears it will be written what bit depth your OS and computer have.

System type (discharge)

If you have a 64-bit OS, then all programs that are designed for x86 will also be supported. And programs that are specially designed for x64 will launch and work much faster.

Not many people know that in Windows there is such a thing as bit depth - x32 (x86), x64. In this short note we will explain what it is on the fingers. There is nothing complicated here and you need to know this, because this is an important point.

The bit capacity of the operating system is roughly and very approximately, this is the number of smallest units of information (bits) that the processor is able to process in one clock cycle (hertz). In the modern world, there are two options for bit depth: 32-bit or 64-bit. 32-bit systems are also called x86: This is a misnomer, but a common one. There are practically no other options - except for the prehistoric 16-bit programs of the MS-DOS and Win98 era.

How do Window 32 and 64 differ in practice? Not the speed of work - that's for sure. A rough example - on the rear axle of trucks there are both 2 and 4 tires. The presence of 4 tires does not make the truck faster or more powerful - but in some cases, a multi-wheel configuration is more convenient: say, when transporting a particularly heavy load. It’s the same with the 64-bit version of Windows: the system won’t become faster, but...

But old 32-bit Windows can work with no more than 4 gigabytes of RAM, which is not enough for modern programs. Even if 8 or 16 GB of physical memory is installed in the computer, the OS is only able to work with 3.5-3.8 gigabytes of them, and the rest of the volume hangs as dead weight. There are non-standard ways to make Windows see more than 4 gigs, but they work every once in a while, and even then, rather, for a cosmetic effect.

The 64-bit version of Windows works confidently with any amount of RAM (up to 32GB).

The differences are short and clear:

x64 - works with RAM up to 32GB. Can run 32 and 64-bit programs.
x32 - works with RAM up to 4GB. Can only run 32-bit programs for which 3 GB of RAM is available.

There are other differences as well. But these are already “iron matters” and you and I don’t need to know them at all, because “The less you know, the better you sleep”...

Bit capacity of programs and drivers

Not only the system, but also programs and drivers can have a bit depth. Most programs were created specifically for 32-bit operating systems. 32-bit applications work fine in a 64-bit environment. On the contrary, it doesn’t work at all: true 64-bit programs are not able to run in 32-bit Windows.

How to find out what bit depth your Windows has?

If you have this question, then most likely you have a 32-bit system - it is more popular and is always installed by default. A 64-bit system is usually installed consciously and intentionally.

It is very easy to understand what bit depth your OS has.

Windows 8, 10

Click right click on Start and select " System". The bit depth will be written in the window that appears.

Windows 7

Find the icon " My computer» click on it right click and select " Properties«.

Windows XP

Start > My computer > Properties> tab " General» > Look at System section: if written 64-bit version, or 64-bit Edition, 64-bit. If this is not the case, but there is something like Service Pack 3, then it is 32-bit.

Is it worth switching to a 64-bit system?

Already, it's worth it! The exceptions are perhaps office computers with old processors and 1-3 gigs of memory on board, where no bells and whistles are needed.

Disadvantage: x64 has perhaps the only disadvantage that might make you think about switching - not all manufacturers have released drivers for 64-bit systems. But today, absolutely all popular programs can work with x64, as well as all modern drivers. Therefore, in 95% of cases this will not be a problem.

There are a lot of advantages: faster programs, improved performance for multi-core processors, support for a large amount of RAM.

Technologies are developing and if a couple of years ago no one really knew about 64-bit systems, today technologies are striving to completely switch to them and it’s only a matter of time.

Verdict? In 90% of cases it's worth switching to x64!

Before proceeding with a direct comparison of 32- and 64-bit versions of Windows, it is worth understanding the differences between 32 and 64-bit processors, operating systems and programs. Let's start with the processor.

Modern processors consist of a large number of blocks. ALU blocks are directly involved in integer calculations. Naturally, they need memory to store input data, intermediate values and results. This memory is registers. 32-bit processors have 8 general-purpose registers of 32 bits in size. Hence they say that the processor is 32-bit. 64-bit processors have twice as many general-purpose registers and are 64-bits in size. That's why they say the processor is 64-bit. The vast majority of modern processors are 64-bit.

In practice, this means that a 64-bit processor in normal 64-bit mode can work with 64-bit numbers. What does this give? This allows you to perform various operations on 64-bit numbers without various tricks, as well as combine two simple operations on 32-bit numbers into one complex one, which in practice gives a performance boost. Also, 64-bit processors support compatibility mode. In this case, they behave like regular 32-bit processors.

Important note: the gain can only be obtained when using the 64-bit x86-64 instruction set. In addition to the integer calculation unit, the processor also has a floating point calculation unit. It has 80-bit registers and uses its own x87 instruction set. It is also called a mathematical coprocessor. Many applications actively use it. Changing the operating system type from 32 to 64-bit will not affect its operation in any way.

In order for the processor to operate in 64-bit mode, a 64-bit operating system is required. If a 32-bit OS is installed, the processor will operate in compatibility mode.

The register width is also related to the maximum amount of memory that the processor can work with. This is because memory address pointers can also be stored in registers. If a 32-bit processor is used or a 64-bit processor in compatibility mode, then the length of the memory address is limited to 32 bits. So it turns out that the address space is limited to approximately 4 GB. Since each device reserves a certain range of addresses for itself, it turns out that the system can work not with all 4 GB of RAM, but with 2.75-3.25 GB. In other words, 32-bit operating systems can work with RAM amounts of up to 2.75-3.25 GB. There are, of course, various ways to work around this limitation, but they are not used on desktop systems.

Well, we've sorted out the processors. But what about running 32-bit programs on a 64-bit system? To do this, the operating system has two sets of system libraries: for 32-bit and 64-bit applications. A similar scheme was used in Windows 95 to work with 16- and 32-bit programs.

That's the whole theory in a very simplified form. Now let's move on to the practical part.

In this article, testing was carried out on an Asus N61Vn laptop with an Intel Core 2 Quad Q9000 processor, an nVidia GeForce GT 240M video card and 4 GB of DDR3-1066 RAM. For comparison, 32- and 64-bit versions of Windows Vista SP2 with the latest updates were used. The driver versions were the same (adjusted for bit depth. For a 32-bit system - a 32-bit version of the driver, for a 64-bit system - a 64-bit version of the video driver). On 32-bit Windows Vista, about 3GB of RAM was available, on 64-bit - 4GB. The reasons are stated above.

This testing can be divided into two parts:

Comparison of the performance of conventional 32-bit programs on 32- and 64-bit Windows;
Comparison of the performance of 32- and 64-bit versions of programs on the corresponding version of Windows.

Comparison of performance of conventional 32-bit programs

In this part we will look at what kind of gain the transition to 64-bit Windows will give. At the moment, most games and programs do not have special 64-bit versions that are optimized for use on 64-bit versions of Windows. In other words, this part will show the difference in performance of most programs and games that are currently available. It is also worth considering that a 32-bit system works with 3 GB of memory, and a 64-bit system with 4 GB.

For this part of testing the following applications were used:

3DMark03 3.6;
3DMark05 1.3;
3DMark06 1.1;
PCMark05 1.2.

Default settings. Screen resolution 1024x768:

Test results in 3DMark05

Default settings. Screen resolution 1280x720:

Test results in 3DMark06

3. Test results in PCMark05

Since this test includes several separate tests, it makes sense to submit them separately.

Overall result in PCMark05

CPU performance in PCMark05

Memory performance in PCMark05

An additional gigabyte of RAM on a 64-bit system does its job.

Graphics performance in PCMark05

Hard drive performance in PCMark05

Results of this part of testing

Everything is quite expected. The 64-bit system is in most cases slightly slower due to the use of compatibility mode with 32-bit programs. An additional gigabyte of memory does not help the situation. Let's move on to the second part of testing.

At the Friday seminar of the educational project of the MIPT-Intel laboratory, one of the students asked me something like this: why is the 64-bit version of the Intel processor architecture called x64, and the 32-bit version called x86? I began to explain that not everything is so simple. I wanted to paint a more complete picture. After all, in fact, this is not x64, or even x86.

386s, Pentiums and Cores

In fact, several names have been coined for this phenomenon, which has been present on the processor technology scene for about forty years. Even more than I would like. They come from different sources and are used in different contexts, by different companies and by different communities. Of course, this creates some confusion.
I tried to collect here all the names known to me. I don’t want to try to prove that one group of names is better than another - they won’t be used less.

8086 and family

In 1978, the 16-bit Intel processor was released, which had the “name” 8086. It was followed by 8088, 80186, 80286, 80386 (plus variations), 80486 (plus variations). It's easy to see that (almost) all of these numeric names end in the two digits 86, which gives the entire series its name x86. It strengthened, it continued to be used even after processors were no longer given digital names, and Intel Pentium, Celeron, Xeon, Core, Atom, etc. appeared. Compatible products from other vendors such as IBM, AMD, Cyrix, VIA, etc. are also described as x86.
According to my observations, x86 is the most popular option for the name of this architecture on the Internet, articles and other literature, especially when the task is not to accurately specify the bit depth of the architecture or we are clearly talking about a 32-bit version.
Variations of this name are also used for 32-bit variants, allowing a more precise indication of the minimum set of supported instructions: i386, i486, i586, i686, - for example, to distinguish between build options for binary packages of Linux distributions.

The coming of 64 bit

Through its efforts, Intel expanded the machine word in the previously described series of processors from 16 to 32 bits. AMD helped achieve this 64-bit architecture by introducing a processor in 2003 that supported new instructions and registers and implemented AMD64.
In order to explicitly indicate the increased bitness of the processor/code/package, the name x86 began to receive a new suffix “64”. It’s just that they didn’t agree on which sign to attribute it to, and sometimes you see x86_64, and sometimes x86-64. For example, the output of the uname command in Linux uses underscore. Finally, packages can also have a suffix amd64 lowercase letters.
Intel designated this extension of the architecture at first IA-32e, then EM64T. Nowadays you can see both variants in various package names, documentation and so on. However, there is a third name introduced by Intel...

What does Intel call it?

In the official documentation, the 32-bit architecture is named IA-32; its 64-bit version received a rather strange name from my point of view Intel 64. Why strange - it creates the potential for confusion, as we will see towards the end of the article.

Software supplier companies

If it seemed to someone that this unfortunate architecture somehow has few names and suffixes, then now I will identify another one that is known to me. It comes from software suppliers who somehow need to distinguish between the versions of packages supplied for 32 and 64 bits. Here their opinions were divided approximately this way (for more details, see Wikipedia).

Linux distributions: x86 and x86_64, sometimes x86 and amd64.
Apple: x86 and x86_64.
Microsoft and Oracle: x86 and x64.

So, another name is x64.

All together

Let me summarize the designations of the Intel architecture options mentioned in my note.

For 32-bit version: IA-32, x86, i386, i486, i586, i686.
For 64-bit version: Intel 64, AMD64, amd64, EM64T, IA-32e, x86_64, x86-64, x64.

Total fourteen. If we discard i386 - i686 as insignificant variations, then ten.

False names

As you know, over its forty-year history, Intel has produced (and is currently producing) not only IA-32 processors. There were and still are products of other architectures. They also have their own names, sometimes somewhat consonant. In this case, confusion occurs, which I would like to warn against.

Intel IA-64. Is a complete synonym for the term "Intel Itanium". Used to denote 64-bit architecture, incompatible neither with IA-32, nor with its 64-bit version, either in the set of commands or in the principles of operation. Yes, there are hardware and software layers for running IA-32 applications on Itanium, but this is a topic for a separate and interesting story. By the way, there is another designation for Itanium - IPF, used occasionally as a suffix.

Unfortunately, the lines of such families of Intel processors as i432, i860, i960 either have not survived to this day, or have an extremely narrow niche of application. And then you look - you would have to remember ten more names for each of them.

Greetings, dear friends. Today we’ll talk, as you understand from the title, about Windows bit depth .

Not many computer users have heard that Windows has a certain bit depth - x32, x64 and x86 and even fewer users actually know what it is, where to get it/change it and why it is needed. There are even a number of myths associated with these bit depths.

While surfing the Internet the other day, I noticed an interesting thing - there is quite a bit of intelligible information on this issue, which actually prompted me to write this article.

Introductory information about Windows bit depth

Let me start, perhaps, with the fact that the bit depths Windows as of today there are two: 32 -bit and 64 -bit, i.e. distributions are divided into x32 And x64 respectively. What about x86- this is nothing more than a designation 32 -x bit version (i.e. if you see x86, then know what we are talking about x32). Why two names are absolutely not clear, but know that if you Not installed specifically 64 -bit operating system, then your Windows has 32 -x bit depth.

However, just in case, you can see the bit depth in the system in the simplest way: find the shortcut" My computer", right-click on it and select properties (the screenshot below is relevant for Windows 7, in the case of Windows XP the window will be slightly different, but the meaning is the same):

Let's figure out how distributions and bit depth differ Windows x32 from Windows x64 and is it worth switching to 64 -bat.

Note: not only the system, but also programs (and drivers) have a bit depth, that is, there are 32 -bit and 64 -bit, and therefore, following the text below, can see and use either a limited amount of memory or all of it.

Is it worth exchanging awl for soap and vice versa?

The main and perhaps the only difference x64 from x32 is that the version x64 can work with memory up to 32 GB and run simultaneously and 64 -bit, and 32 -bit applications, whereas traditional x32 can only address up to 4 GB memory, run only 32 -bit programs for which only 3 GB(to put it simply, even if on the computer 4 GB(and more) memory, then 32 -bit system will display and work only with 3 -me, and the rest of the memory will simply remain idle, because neither the system nor the programs will simply see it).

Version x64 the situation is different: for 32 -bit applications are all available 4 (and more) GB , and for 64 -bit applications are generally all the RAM that is physically installed in the computer. I repeat that 64 -bit system can run both applications, but not vice versa.

In general terms, this is it. The rest is a bunch of technical and not very detailed details that, in general, you don’t really need to know, and therefore I’ll simply give some results that will explain why it’s worth/not worth (it’s up to you to decide anyway) to switch to x64.

Which Windows bit depth should you choose and why?

Let's go. All the pros and cons of switching to bit depth Windows x64:

64 -bit version Windows, formally looks and feels exactly the same as a regular 32 -bit, i.e. there are no special innovations or bonuses in it, however, people with multi-core processors can experience a performance increase when using such a system and 64 -bit applications in it (which, however, is not relevant for everyone and not always);
x64 able to see and work with RAM 4 and more GB. But x32 only sees 3 GB, even if physically the RAM strips cost more. That is, people who have a large amount of memory in their computer will get more performance for 64 -bit system and fewer problems with insufficient RAM;
Not for all computers and hardware in it, manufacturers have released 64 - bit versions of drivers, which can become a problem when switching to such a system. Check the availability of drivers on the website of the manufacturers of motherboards, video cards, etc., it is possible that you simply will not be able to migrate from 32 -discharge system;
Majority x32 applications work great in x64 systems, but not vice versa;
Formally, the meaning of the transition mainly lies in the amount of memory on board the computer. If less 4 GB, then there is almost no point in crossing. If it’s more (or you want to put more), then it’s worth it. Naturally, for most systems, applications and games, the rule “The more memory, the better” is relevant. Why? Read in my article ""
My opinion is clear x64, because a large amount of memory and, sometimes, improved performance for multi-cores definitely rules.

Briefly something like this.

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How to find out the bitness of Windows

I already said above how to look at the bit depth, however, just in case, I’ll tell you one more way (relevant for Windows XP):

Click " Start- Execute."
Type in the window that opens: winmsd.exe and press the button OK.
In the details pane, in the column " Element"find item" Type". If the system is 32-bit, then the item " Type"will make a difference" X86 based computer"If the system 64 -bit, then point " Type"will make a difference" Itanium-based computer".

This was an option for those who used the method above, but the bit depth is not determined or not specified.

Afterword

Something like that. I hope that now you know about Windows bit depth, if not all, then much more than before.

In general, I am a supporter of progress, and everything is clearly moving towards a complete transition to x64 systems and applications. And this is good, because the more memory and the faster it is, along with the processor, the higher the performance and the more comfortable it is to work.

Perhaps, like this. If you have any other questions, write in the comments;)

PS: My articles on the topic of nimbleness x64-systems here: " " and here: " ".