On Sat, May 26, 2001 at 11:44:23AM -0600, prasanna wrote:
> I have a basic doubt, what do they mean but telling 64 bit
> applications, 32 bit application, or 16 bit applications.
> Does this have to do something witht he processor or compiler. OR is it the
> number of data lines from the processor. I mean for instance x386 has 32 bit
> registers.
It means how the application sees the system. A 16 bit system
application can only address 2^16=65536 bytes (although the 8086 could
address 1MB through a trick called segmentation). A 32 bit system can
address 2^32=4Gbytes, and a 64 bit system can address 2^64 = 16
exabytes. Note that the CPU must support the application types.
Some operating systems allow different application types to run at the
same time. Windows 95 runs on the 32 bit 80x86 and supports 16 and 32
bit applications, IRIX runs on the 64 bit MIPS R10000 and supports 32
and 64 bit aplications, Sparc64Linux runs on the 64 bit UltraSparc and
supports 32 and 64 bit applications.
Note that a 16 bit application on a 32 bit CPU can still be allowed to
use the 32 bit data registers: the application type doesn't dictate the
data size.
Erik
PS: This is more a question for the kernelnewbies mailing list. Check
out http://www.kernelnewbies.org/ .
--
J.A.K. (Erik) Mouw, Information and Communication Theory Group, Department
of Electrical Engineering, Faculty of Information Technology and Systems,
Delft University of Technology, PO BOX 5031, 2600 GA Delft, The Netherlands
Phone: +31-15-2783635 Fax: +31-15-2781843 Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
WWW: http://www-ict.its.tudelft.nl/~erik/
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