ess more memory on 64 bits. So you can load larger files and generate more data.
Every time you store something in memory it has to be stored at a specific location. We call this location an address. The first thing you store can be stored at address 0*. If that thing requires a total of 18 bytes, then addresses 0 through 17 are used up. The next thing you store can then be stored at address 18. And so on and so forth. At some point you run out of addresses and when that happens there is no more room to store any new data and there is thus nothing more that your app can do and that's usually when Windows shoots the application in the head and buries the remains behind the chemical sheds.
The total number of unique addresses that can be represented by a 32-bit integer is 4,294,967,295 (4 GigaByte). However Windows only allows a 32-bit app to access 2GB, or potentially 3GB if a special switch is set. A 64-bit application is allowed to use 64-bit integers to identify memory addresses, which means the highest possible address is now 18,446,744,073,709,551,616 (or 18.45 ExaBytes). Basically, as long as you have RAM to back you up, a 64-bit application will not run out of memory. Of course it may still become prohibitively slow as a lot of data requires a lot of computation and 64-bitness does absolutely nothing to make things go faster.
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David Rutten
david@mcneel.com
Vienna, Austria
* Not true in reality, Windows will already use up some of the available memory just to load the application.…
Added by David Rutten at 1:39pm on November 2, 2012