First, the original design intentions are different:

The original design intention of the 64-bit operating system is to meet the needs of mechanical design and analysis, three-dimensional animation, video editing and creation, as well as scientific computing and high performance Customer demand in areas such as computing applications that require large amounts of memory and floating point performance. In other words, they are operating platforms for high-tech personnel to use special software in their industry. And 32-bit operating systems are designed for ordinary users.

Second, the required configurations are different:

A 64-bit operating system can only be installed on a 64-bit computer (the CPU must be 64-bit). At the same time, you need to install 64-bit common software to get the best performance of 64-bit (x64). 32-bit operating systems can be installed on 32-bit (32-bit CPU) or 64-bit (64-bit CPU) computers. Of course, when a 32-bit operating system is installed on a 64-bit computer, its hardware is like a "big horse and a small cart": 64-bit performance will be greatly reduced.

Third, the operating speed is different:

The data width of 64-bit CPU GPRs (General-Purpose Registers, general-purpose registers) is 64 bits, and the 64-bit instruction set can run 64-bit data Instructions, that is to say, the processor can extract 64-bit data at a time (only two instructions are required to extract 8 bytes of data at a time), which is one step higher than 32-bit (requiring four instructions to extract 4 bytes of data at a time). times, theoretically the performance will be improved by 1 times accordingly.

Fourth, different addressing capabilities:

The advantage of 64-bit processors is also reflected in the system's control of memory. Since addresses use special integers, an ALU (arithmetic logic unit) and registers can handle larger integers, which means larger addresses. For example, Windows Vista x64 Edition supports up to 128 GB of memory and up to 16 TB of virtual memory, while 32-bit CPUs and operating systems can only support up to 4G of memory

Fifth, software popularity is different:< /p>

Currently, there are far fewer 64-bit commonly used software than 32-bit commonly used software. The reason is simple: relatively few users use 64-bit operating systems. Therefore, software developers must consider the "input-output ratio" and invest limited funds into software for more user groups. This is also an important reason why 64-bit software is relatively expensive (spreading the cost over fewer releases).