Advantages of 64-bit Hardware

64-bit hardware is no longer the next, big thing coming to the computer industry. Over the past several years, the 64-bit hardware environment has seen significant penetration in the personal computer and server market as engineering challenges have been worked through to alleviate concerns by consumers and industry in having to spend significant monies to invest in the 64 bit hardware environment. When the first 64 bit computers were introduced, the common complaint was that there was little to no performance benefit seen by the end-user while the processors were used to run 32 bit programs. While this is mostly true, new computer software programs have been written through updates and new releases to take advantage of the new hardware and realize a resulting performance benefit.

The 64 Bit Hardware Environment

There has been a market for 64 bit hardware for a number of years in scientific and mathematical circles. Over the last few years of the 2000s, however, the majority of Intel-based computers and servers have been sold with the processors. There are still a number of computers that use 32-bit architectures deployed to the field, however, as advanced server software packages become increasingly reliant on the greater processing capacity found with 64 bit processors. These CPU's are capable of calculating individual tasks twice as fast as a 32-bit CPU, and can make use of significantly more computer RAM than their 32-bit predecessors that have a 4 GB limitation. 64-bit CPU's are also being deployed now with a 64-bit data bus which allows the full capability of the processor to be used.

What Are the Advantages of 64-Bit Hardware?

64-bit hardware has a number of advantages over legacy CPUs. These include the ability to support up to 1,024 GB of physical and addressable memory, 16 terabytes of virtual memory, and significantly larger blocks of continuous memory for server-side applications to use. 64-bit hardware also offers a faster computer bus architecture and allows threads or processes to call functions faster by passing up to four arguments at a single time. The processors are also more secure than legacy CPU's by making it harder for computer hackers to exploit a buffer overflow attack through passing the parameters for procedure calls through registers first. For Intel-based, Microsoft servers, Microsoft Patch Guard technology is used to prevent non-Microsoft applications from making changes to the Windows kernel making it more difficult for unauthorized users to gain access to the kernel. 64-bit hardware is also considered more scaleable than 32-bit hardware due to the open-ended approach to the virtual memory address space and support for significantly more physical memory on the computer.