There are people who can hardly wait to upgrade to it, while others already fear its novelty. There are people who expect an improvement in quality, while others do not make full use even of the existing capacities. There are people who use technical aspects as arguments, while others think that those mean-spirited marketing people have cooked up something again to get the money out of their pockets. Who is right? Who will benefit from the 64-bit technology, and who will not? After all, what is 64-bit?

A bit is the basic unit of information. It can hold one of two values: 0 or 1. It is a digital, i.e. a two-state, quantity: it can be either one or zero, or in other words: yes or no. This is exactly how digital electronic circuits work: the current is either present at certain points of the circuit, or they are not. Of course, such simple circuits can be used to build highly complicated systems. E.g. even a microprocessor can be constructed using just some of these basic circuits. A microprocessor is called the central processing unit (CPU). Advanced microprocessors consist of 200-300 million basic elements today.

Intel 4004, the first 4 bit CPU

The first CPU was a 4-bit processor. This means that it could process 4 bits of information simultaneously. If we put 4 bits next to each other, and each bit can hold a value of 0 or 1, then we can create a total of 16 different value combinations. These combinations can be viewed as values expressed in the binary number system. Every such processing unit can take a value between 0 and 15 expressed in our good old decimal number system. So the early 4-bit processors were capable of expressing the values of the usual digits from 0 to 9. What is more, more of these can be put in a row, and then we can express any high value number with them. The calculators of the 70s, which were capable of performing the four basic arithmetical operations, contained such early microprocessors.