32 bit vs 64 bit

computer hardware and software can come in 32 or 64-bit versions the difference between a 32-bit and a 64-bit is the way that it handles memory the bit size refers to the memory that it can address a 32-bit system can reference 2 to the 32nd power bytes of memory which equals to about 4 gigabytes however a 64-bit system can reference 2 to the 64th power bytes of memory which equals to about 16 exabytes which is 4 billion times more memory than a 32-bit now that number is so huge that it's virtually unlimited because we will never need to use that amount of memory so in a computer in order for data or a program to run it needs to be loaded into Ram first so the data is stored on the slower hard drive and from the hard drive it's loaded into the faster Ram and once it's loaded into Ram the CPU can now access the data or run the program now in a 32-bit system since the maximum amount of memory that it can support is 4 gigabytes it may not be enough to hold all the data that the CPU needs to make the computer run as fast as possible and when this happens then some of the data has to be kept on the slower harddrive to compensate for the low memory so instead of data going from RAM to the CPU it has to do extra work by going back to the slower hard drive and when this happens it slows down the computer but in a 64-bit system it's able to store a lot more memory than 4 gigabytes which means that more data can be stored into the faster Ram than on a slower harddrive and because it can store more data into RAM the computer is able to run a lot faster so in a nutshell this is why a 64-bit system is faster than a 32-bit system