Will 32 Bit be ancient news soon?

As RAM installed in PCs increases. What happens when we hit past 4GB RAM.

I've read (alot of conflicting info tho), that a 32 bit OS is only able to use up to 4GB RAM. Depending what site I was on. Some say up to 3GB.

But if any of this is close to the truth, will 32 Bit be history?


And what is 64 Bit capable of, since I heard there is a limit on that too.


Also I was on the Mac site, (playing around with config) and set a Desktop Mac for 16GB RAM. Would OSX handle that? Would Vista only use 4GB of that?


Sorry for the scattered questions, but you get the point.

 

64 bit can handle 128GB of ram

 

I don't think the RAM is the issue, if we gonna still use the program/software that don't even need that much of RAM... so there no point to have like 16Gb RAM or something like that eventho the processor can handle it when the program only use like less 2% or 3% of it only... so it will take some times before the developer really use the 64bit technology for the home user software. i wouldnt worried for that for the time being cause from what i use rite now... i don't even need to have 3Gb RAM...

 

32 bit won't be history in the near future as some graphics programming still cannot be done on it.

However when DX10 eventually does totally take over from DX9 then yes, 32 bit might become obselete.

 

32 bit OS's can use many gigabytes of RAM through schemes such as PAE and so on, which extends the memory address pointers to 48bit I believe. But in general, they only allow direct access of up to 4GB of RAM (2^32 = 4GB of address space). This is lowered because the upper parts of memory are taken up by video RAM address mappings and DMA accesses, etc. That's where the 3GB number you hear of comes from... it's the most you can almost certainly have usable under a 32bit OS without special hacks in programs and the operating system.

Yes, 32bit will start being deprecated when memory amounts start climbing over 4GB. It won't happen for another 5-10 years though, as there is too much equipment that works fine now, and doesn't need the extra memory.

OSX is 64bit native, so yes, it would handle 16GB of RAM. As would Vista X86-64. The 32bit version of Vista would not, though.

Try 16 exabytes. Chipsets limitations and other things can limit you otherwise, but if you have a full 64bit system, there's enough headroom for pretty much all the data you would ever have locally accessible, ever. Even with Moore's law.

Some graphics programming? Tell me what programming can't be done in 64bit. If you mean that some graphics cards don't have 64bit wide data paths, that's true, but why not just use a 32bit number for feeding the graphics card it's data, and then use a 64bit number otherwise? No technical reason it can't be done. But even then, that's what 64bit drivers are for... they deal with all that. BTW, DX10 has nothing whatsoever to do with 64bits. It's just a different GUI toolkit that has a few neat things accessible to developers, and it happened to come out at the same time as a major design change in GPU technology happened.

 

As Pitabred said, 32-bit OS'es can, with a bit of trickery, use more RAM. But individual applications are stuck with <4GB as far as I know.

As for when 32 bit becomes obsolete, I think it's the other way around. We won't get more than 4GB RAM before 32bit becomes obsolete. In other words, what we're waiting for isn't ram becoming cheaper or more widespread. (because no one are going to buy more than 4GB no matter how cheap it is)
Nor is it higher memory requirements from applications (because no application is going to require more than ~2GB if they plan on being able to sell the product)

What we're waiting for is simply 32 bit to go away and 64 bit to become commonplace, but it'll have to happen without the pressure of "we need more than 4GB memory", because that pressure just won't really happen until we've *got* 64 bit.

 

The answer to this question actually has a fairly simple answer, now - 32-bit will be obsolete when the next version of Windows comes out. Slashdot ran a story recently that quotes an MS exec as saying that Vienna will only be 64-bit, which is not altogether surprising, as this is a move that many thought Vista would take. And given the fact that as of the Celeron M 5xx series, even the most basic new consumer processors are now 64-bit, so it should be an unnoticed transition for many. Add on top of that the vastly improving software and hardware support for 64-bit, and the sketchy evidence that AMD may have a prototype 128-bit processor, and it seems high time we move away from 32-bit.

 

I think we will very quickly move to 4GB and beyond. I mean, 2GB is pretty much the minimum for a gaming PC with Vista, and 4GB (and by extension, 64-bit) will quickly become the standard for enthusiast systems throughout the next year. I mean, games are already using half a Gig by themselves, which is more than some PC's had in them even just a couple of years ago. See here:

Oblivion is using 505MB, and with just a few other high-RAM-usage programs open (like that lovely 1080P Transformers trailer running in the background), my whole system is using ~ 1.7 GB of RAM. Granted, a lot of that is Vista's more effective use of RAM (it doesn't release RAM just because you close a program - it keeps a little bit so you can open it faster the next time you use it), but still, that's a lot of RAM.

Games will begin using over 1GB very soon (some already do - think the Battlefield-series on a 64-man server), and it's only a matter of time before programs are using 2GB+ within the next few years.

 

As technology trickles down, yes.

 

I'm willing to bet my laptop that AMD isn't working on a 128-bit CPU.
Would make absolutely no sense.

Yes, and half a gig still means only 25% of the available memory space is used (if we go with 2gigs, which is what applications can normally access under Windows)
So there's room for quadrupling this before we run into any serious problems.
And who do you think would make a game that required more than 2GB RAM before 80% of all gaming PC's had at least that much?

No one, that's who. There won't be any applications requiring more than 4GB RAM until everyone *has* more than 4GB RAM. And everyone won't have 4GB RAM until 64 bit is *already* commonplace.

You're right, enthusiast systems will switch fairly soon. But it's not the enthusiasts that drive the software market. No one writes software that only enthusiasts are able to run.

Memory pressure means nothing. Developers can always come up with ways to use less memory. Performance might take a beating, but it's possible. (And is in a way already done. The sensible thing for a game to do would be to load everything into memory, and let the OS page things in and out as necessary. That's impossible because of the 32 bit limit because todays games are already far too big, so instead, they have to keep loading and unloading resources manually.)

Oh yeah, and a bit of history. It took ages to make the transition from 16 to 32 bit. We're talking a decade or more. And this time, the benefits are nowhere near as clear cut.
Don't assume that 64 bit will take over tomorrow.

The 386 CPU came out in 1986. By 1995, the first popular 32 bit OS came out. That's 9 years before we could even *start* the transition to 32 bit. And then, of course, it took at least another 4 years before people had actually stopped using DOS. Fallout came out in 1997, 11 years after the 32 bit CPU, and it still supported DOS.

as lowlymarine said, we will transition to 64 bit when Microsoft makes us. It's that simple. Until they make the jump, there won't be applications that make use of more than 2GB , and there won't be systems with more than 4GB.

(That said, even if Vienna is 64 bit only, you then have to add ~5 years from it is released before it's become the standard OS.

My guess is that 32 bit will have vanished from everyday use by 2013, maybe 2015.

 

Good stuff guys. Wouldn't multitasking be a factor too?

 

AMD wouldn't need 128 bits of memory address width. 64bit is already like 16 exabytes of RAM that you can access. The ONLY thing they might use 128 for is for better scientific floating point, but even then, there are very, very few applications that use that. Some things like full-earth rendering stuff, or possibly molecular modeling. Everything else, even 64bit math is almost overkill.

 

I'd guess 2010 or 2012 before 64bit becomes the mainstream technology (near the end of Vista's life when a lot of people need new PCs and (hopefully) Vista bugs are gone)...at least. So that 2013-2015 end-of-32bit sounds about right to me.

Last I checked parts of a CPU (SSE engines I think) are already 128bit wide to help with media work...I though those could process 2x 64bit or 4x 32bit instructions at once (can someone confirm/deny)? That would be the biggest advantage of 128bit, if multiple 'lower-bitness' instructions could run in parallel. Of course, we might be talking a whole new architecture here...

 

Yep, but here we have a bit more flexibility. It is possible to coax a 32-bit OS into handling more than 4GB memory, *as long* as no single process gets more than 4GB allocated. So if we really need to multitask, we could have a 32GB OS, where each individual process uses somewhere less than 4GB (or 2GB is the more common limit per process under Windows)
But yeah, multitasking might be where 64 bit first shows off an improvement, mainly because it doesn't require new software or, technically speaking, more RAM (You could still have a system with, say, 2GB RAM, and just a huge pagefile of, say, 30GB)

Yep, true.
(And that's one reason why it's a bit tricky to say how many bits today's CPU's really are. A Core 2, say, has elements of both 16, 32, 64 and 128bit architectures. (It also provides a pretty good emulation of a 8-bit architecture)

Yeah, but that's generally not considered when talking about the "bitness" of a CPU. What is meant then is the width of its "native" data type. That is, how big a number can it process in one instruction? With SSE, you might be able to crunch 128 bits of data, but each individual number can only be 64 bit.
Also, specialized instruction sets like this (or even regular floating-point instructions) are considered cheating anyway because they're not really general-purpose. They're just for blind number-crunching, and lack a lot of functionality.
CPU's have been able to deal with 64-bit floating point numbers (and actually 80 bit too, through one of Intel's sillier design blunders) ever since the 386. But no one are claiming the 386 was a 80-bit CPU.
But the general-purpose part, the bit that deals with all the logic, with memory addresses and generally speaking, with integers, was 32 bits until recently. And now, 64 bit is supported there as well so we consider the CPU 64-bit. More or less. As long as we don't look too closely...

But there'd be no point in being able to process 128 bit data. It doesn't make sense for memory addresses (because 128 bit is huge, and we'd be able to address every single molecule on the entire planet with it), and it doesn't make sense for computations either because:
- It'd be slow
- Most applications wouldn't benefit from it (32 or 64 bit is plenty for almost everything. 64 bit is allows us to represent numbers up to roughly 16*10^18, which is good enough for most things. And for the rare situations where we need bigger numbers? 128 bit probably wouldn't be enough anyway, and anyway, infinite-precision numbers can be easily emulated.

In fact, I doubt we'll ever see 128-bit CPU's. At least, not unless some miracle happens in CPU manufacturing (and it has to be a miracle. Even if it'd only lower performance by 2%, and increase manufacturing costs by the same, it still wouldn't be done. Even if it was completely free, it'd be unlikely, because transitioning to a new architecture is always a pain)

Still, both AMD and Intel are definitely messing around with SSE and 128-bit vector processing (doing multiple computations on smaller numbers), and trying to boost performance there, so you could argue that they're working on 128 bit CPU's. Just not in the conventional sense

 

More than that.
Wikipedia -"The emergence of the 64-bit architecture effectively increases the memory ceiling to 264 addresses, equivalent to 17,179,869,184 gigabytes or 16 exabytes of RAM".

The 128GB limit is from Microsoft as no computers on earth, combined together hits 16 exabytes of RAM.

32bit will still be around for a while given 32bit Vista, say 3 more years and it will transition to a backward compatibility stage like the ancient 16 bit MSDos.

 

Whatever Wikipedia says, current 64-bit CPU's can only handle 48 bit addresses. There's just no need for anything more. That still allows 256 terabyte, which should be enough for a few more years. (Of course, the OS may place further limitations)

 

Yea, but imagine a day where we have computers that start up in nanoseconds, and have millions of GB of RAM. And MS is not the dominant OS on earth

 

We already have the new OSX coming out with native 64-bit support (with backward compatibility smoothness that puts Microsoft to shame). And I wouldn't be surprised if the next Windows OS was only 64-bit as well. In a couple of years, it just wouldn't make sense to make a 32-bit OS for almost all applications, as almost all but the older or extremely bargain bin CPUs are going to be 64-bit.

 

http://techreckoner.com/end-of-32-bit-processors-atleast-microsoft-confirms-that/

So Vista is the last Upgrade for anyone with a 32bit processor.

 

I heard about this a few months back...it will be interesting to see if microsoft actually manages to pull this off.

 

Well computers do start up in nanoseconds, it's just that they aren't ready for user input until they finish starting up. And we're on the cusp of petabyte storage, I'd say sometime within the next decade you'll see a device capable of storing that much binary data---probably in a distributed scheme of some sort.

 

My Vista offers me a choice of 32 or 64 bit, I'm currently running 32bit but I'm about to experiment with 64bit on my HP desktop (AMD 64 X2). Will 1GB be enough? 32Bit works just fine and quick on 1GB, just wondering if 64Bit will chance any thing. Will I be better or worst off? Don't care about software compatibility since I'm just experimenting.

I'm also thinking to do this with Ubuntu.

 

You're having Ultimate?

There will not be a difference in 32bit and 64bit, and 1GB will be enough for your experiments.

Compatibilty > 32bit
Performance in the future > 64bit