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VIRTUALISATION Is it time to go 64-bit with Windows 7?
VIRTUALISATION Is it time to go 64-bit with Windows 7? | Is it time to go 64-bit with Windows 7? |
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| by David M Williams | |
| Sunday, 30 August 2009 | |
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For most people their first potential 64-bit opportunities came with the release of 64-bit AMD and Intel processors which saw support in Windows XP 64-bit edition as well as Linux. However, nobody “accidently” found themself able to run these operating systems; you needed to determinedly purchase 64-bit hardware. This was not merely a matter of procuring a 64-bit processor; many hardware items lacked 64-bit Windows drivers so invariably printers or scanners or video cards or other components needed to be specially chosen. This is no longer the case; hardware support improved through Windows Vista 64-bit edition and now Windows 7 64-bit edition. In part this is because 64-bit systems have become mainstream, particularly in the server market with applications like Microsoft Exchange 2007 only coming in a 64-bit version. It is also due to the x86-64 architecture devised by AMD which is less radical in design than Intel’s earlier Itanium processor but which offers greater backwards compatibility with 32-bit code. So what actually does 64-bit mean? It’s a term which those of us who are technically-inclined bandy about forgetting that it can be unfamiliar to those around us. I was reminded of this recently when calling a software vendor’s help-desk to ask if they had a 64-bit version of their product only to be told that the support person had never heard that term before. Fundamentally, a 64-bit architecture means that the units of data used by the processor are 64 bits (or eight bytes) wide. Specifically, this means you can store larger numbers and you can address a vast amount more memory. Readers growing up in the same era as myself will remember the venerable Commodore 64 and similar computers. These were 8-bit systems and could handle a maximum of 64KB of memory. At the time that was a huge amount of memory. Now it is not unusual for a modern computer to have at least 2GB RAM. Just as the 8-bit machines had a maximum amount of memory they could use so too a 32-bit operating system tops out at 4GB. So, an immediate benefit of using a 64-bit system is the rise of the memory ceiling to a massive 16 exabytes of RAM – or 16.8 million terabytes, or 17.2 billion gigabytes! Additionally, by being able to work with bigger numbers 64-bit systems are far more capable for processing vast sets of data. You might not think or yourself as handling huge databases but consider that with the rising popularity of high-definition media it is becoming more usual to have video files that are larger than 4GB. This theory and history is all well and good – but can you actually go to 64-bits without having to shell out for a new computer? Over the page I'll tell you how to find out, and what happened to me. |
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