Inside the Machine

Current 64-Bit Applications

Now that you know what 64-bit computing is, let’s look at the benefits of increased integer and address sizes.

Dynamic Range

The main thing that a wider integer gives you is increased dynamic range. Instead of giving a one-line definition of the term dynamic range, I’ll just explain how it works.

In the base-10 number system which you’re all accustomed to, you can represent a maximum of 10 integers (0 to 9) with a single digit. This is because base-10 has 10 different symbols with which to represent numbers. To represent more than 10 integers, you need to add another digit, using a combination of two symbols chosen from among the set of 10 to represent any one of 100 integers (00 to 99). The formula you can use to compute ...