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32-bit or 64-bit is the number of data bits that a computer can handle in a register, with the data bus, with an instruction manipulation, etc. In a "standard" 8-bit per byte system, 32 bits can hold four bytes, and 64 bits can hold 8 bytes.

The designations 32-bit and 64-bit also refer to the operating mode of the processor. The IA-32 architecture, which started with the 80386 microprocessor, could handle 32-bit data and it had a 32-bit address bus. That is a 4GB address space, of which 2GB is used for the program, 1GB is used for shared DLL's, and 1GB is used for the operating system.

While a 32-bit address space is quite large, some programs, particularly database programs, need to manuipulate more than 2GB without needing to "think" about address segmentation.

The 64-bit architecture solves this by allowing much larger address spaces to be created, up to 8TB, depending on the operating system. The operating system runs in 64-bit mode, and it supports programs written in both 64-bit mode and 32-bit mode.

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