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Old 02-12-2008, 08:09 AM   #47
llama64
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Clarkey View Post
Can someone explain the 32 bit vs. 64 bit difference? Is this a hardware or software differentiation, what does it mean to me, the user?
In a practical sense to us as end users, going to 64bit means unsupported hardware, crappy drivers and endless headaches. Supposedly it means a faster system but in all my experience with XP64, Vista x64 and Ubuntu x64, I've never noticed.

It really comes into play if you're doing a lot of media work with video or large sound files. It means the the amount of instructions that are fed into the CPU is essentially doubled over x32bit leading to faster processing on more of the data.

If you feel like giving yourself a technology migraine (), check out this explanation at wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/64_bit#32_vs_64_bit
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