Why x64 and x86

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Viewed k times. Improve this question. Peter Mortensen Jack Kada Jack Kada 3 3 gold badges 8 8 silver badges 10 10 bronze badges. Did you try wiki: en. RBT 1 1 silver badge 9 9 bronze badges. Simon Foster Simon Foster 2, 6 6 gold badges 35 35 silver badges 54 54 bronze badges. I just asked myself this this-morning!

IMHO, "x86" does not mean and never has meant just any generic bit architecture. Daniel's answer below gives the history. There are lots of other bit processors that are both contemporaneous to or older than the , and quite a few are still alive and well in the market today.

The family used in the original Macintosh is much older than the , for instance. The PowerPC's claim to fame when new was strong emulation support for both x86 and 68K.

The ARM is bit, more modern, and quite common as well. I don't see it as x64, at least I don't writ it that way. I write it as 32b and 64b, respectively.

Show 5 more comments. Active Oldest Votes. In other words, it's more marketing than technology for the reason. Improve this answer. Bart Silverstrim Bart Silverstrim And because x86 originated with the I've never been able to work out why it's always associated with 32 bits. As I recall, the was a 16 bit processor, which used double registers to enable 32 bit memory addressing. Intel was far from being a leader in the field in those days. BTW gWaldo, you left out the From Wikipedia, "Both the architecture and the physical chip were therefore developed rather quickly by a small group of people, and using the same basic microarchitecture elements and physical implementation techniques as employed for the slightly older and for which the also would function as a continuation.

Yea, I left out the because I honestly couldn't remember if it had been a released product and was feeling too lazy to look it up This answer has nothing wrong, but I honestly think Daniel's should be the accepted one, as it's much more detailed. Show 1 more comment. Later, because people are lazy, the x became known simply as the x So, in answer to your question, because x64 is shorter than x This is because the size of a bit value will not allow any more.

Modern processors support a technology what is known as a Physical Address Extension PAE , first introduced in the Intel Pentium Pro, and it allows the operating system to access a physical address space of more than 4 GB, up to 64 GB in fact. Home versions of bit Windows do enforce a hard limit of 4 GB though due to licensing and driver compatibility reasons. It gets worse though for bit systems. Check out this write-up by Windows expert Mark Russinovich , where he reveals that Windows only gets to use 2.

So what do you get with Bit? Well, as I mentioned earlier, you can access up to Each process in bit Windows gets more memory too. With bit versions, you only got 2 GB allocated to each process, but with bit versions, each application has access to 8 TB of virual memory, which is a considerable increase! That said, bit audio samples are generally more than good enough for nearly all applications and in general you can't tell the difference between the two formats.

One scenario where you might want to use bit audio is when a signal is going to be heavily processed through a long chain of plugins. By using bit audio you can reduce the accumulation of rounding errors that might occur by using a less precise number format.