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64-Bit Computing: A silent revolution? (alien.top)

submitted 11 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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I was recently reading Tracy Kidder's excellent book Soul of a New Machine.

The author pointed out what a big deal the transition to 32-Bit computing was.

However, in the last 20 years, I don't really remember a big fuss being made of most computers going to 64-bit as a de facto standard. Why is this?

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago (4 children)

Well we are still kind of transitioning to 64-bit. Chip makers/designers are still having to include instruction sets for 16/32-bit which does limit in some respects on how big the transition really is.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Removal of those would break a lot of software, especially removal of 32bit support. Bye, bye thousands (if not millions) of Windows 95/98/XP games & programs!

One of the big features of Windows is its backwards compatibility.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Gee really? Here's me thinking 32-bit instruction sets were cosmetic. Thank you for ignoring the part where I said we're still in a transition phase.

Also, with a bit of tinkering, you can run 16-bit applications. It's just recommend to use virtualisation applications because Microsoft doesn't ensure quality updates for 16 bit applications.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Point is that seldom used instructions are microcoded anyway, so they take zero space on the CPU.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago

I honestly don't know when you are talking about. CPUs aren't storage devices.

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