Re: FN-FORUM: Macintosh

date posted 7th February 2004 17:33

On Saturday 07 Feb 2004 5:45 pm, Emma Trehane wrote:
> can someone just give me an idea of what is special about a 64 bit
> processor? Apologies for my ignorance.

The data shovel is twice as wide as a 32 bitter. So you can shovel twice
as many bits per scoop. The other main thing is you have a much bigger
address space so you are not limited to the "native" 4GB address space=20
of the 32 bit world. In other words, you can have loads and loads of RAM=
=2E

(Tho' of course over the years there have been various bodges to allow
32 bitters to address more than 4GB).