32-Bit Computing: What's It All About?

What Does 32-bit Mean?

A binary digit, or bit, is the smallest unit of data that a computer
can process. All other things being equal, the more bits your computer
can process at the same time, the faster it is.

Most desktop computers manipulate bits in groups of 16 or 32. If you
have two computers whose clock (processing) speed is identical, and one
processes 32 bits at a time while the other processes 16, the 32-bit
computer will be about twice as fast.

Advantages

One advantage of 32-bit systems is speedier processing for resource-
hungry applications such as math packages, graphics and publishing
programs, and network operations.

In addition, when a machine's internal addressing scheme uses 32
bits, it can address much larger amounts of memory and hard disk space.

Yet another advantage of 32-bit systems is faster multitasking, where
two or more applications run at the same time. An operating system
performs multi-tasking by sending different parts of many tasks to the
CPU at different times. Of course, the faster the system, the less
likely it is that the user will notice what's going on behind the
scenes.