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Can you run a 32bit OS on a 64bit CPU?

jsmoke

jsmoke

jsmoke

Soldato
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17 Jun 2012
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Was thinking of getting a quad core i5, so it's stated it's 64bit, is it backward comparable with 32bit also?

How about OS's can you run both 32bit OS's and 64Bit OS on a 64bit cpu?
 
Yes, Windows and Linux, in Linux 32Bit is i386, 64Bit is The AMD64 flavour of Linux. ignore the AMD in 64Bit, Intel use the same extension, they just call it a different name. it work the same on both CPUs.

Keep in mind that with 32Bit the OS can only use 3.2GB of RAM, no matter how much RAM you actually have installed.

Really, if you have a 64Bit CPU you should be running a 64Bit OS, regardless if its Windows or some Linux flavour like Ubuntu.
 
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i hope this question is purely hypothetical. running an i5 with a 32bit OS would be.... :eek: i can't imagine anyone having a cpu like that with less than 4GB of ram.

if you have 32 bit windows vista/7/8/8.1, you're perfectly entitled to install the 64bit version using the same license key. a 64bit OS runs 32bit software just fine - quite a lot of popular software is still 32bit only. it's just the drivers that have to be native 64bit.
 
humbug said:
Keep in mind that with 32Bit the OS can only use 3.2GB of RAM, no matter how much RAM you actually have installed.
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Click to expand...

Not strictly accurate.

You are correct in that there is no point in installing more than 4GB of ram (and given that majority of pc's work best with identical RAM DIMMs in a pair, most would install 2*2GB) but it then depends on how big the monitor is and how much vram is installed on the video card as to how much usable ram is left (might go under 3.2Gb)
 
I think the rule was that 32bit OS only have enough memory addressing for 4GB, so if you had 4GB system memory and a graphics card with 1GB then you would only have 3GB usable.
 
What OS do you want to run? if your worried about not being able to run some 32Bit software on a 64Bit Linux just install the 32Bit libraries.

Go to Terminal and type this (sudo apt-get install ia32-libs) without the brackets, hit Return, type in your account pass, hit return again... answer yes to all questions, wait for it to install, your done.
 
tamzzy said:
question is, why run a 32bit os?
Click to expand...

Much as it pains me to admit, we have to run half our systems in my office on Windows 7 32bit due to legacy hardware drivers that there simply aren't 64bit versions of. We're also not talking 2 or 3 required drivers, it's more like hundreds from different manufacturers. Hence one of my two work PCs on my desk is an i7-2600 with a 120GB C300 SSD, 2TB drive, 2x 5770 GPUs, Blu-ray writer, 8GB DDR3 installed ..... and a 32bit OS! :rolleyes:

Not relevant to the OP, I presume, but just demonstrating that sadly sometimes there is still a requirement to have a 32bit OS installed.
 
Paint balling? did that when i was a youth, ended up covered in bruises but it was the most fun i ever had. :)
 
Further food for thought: Since the Pentium Pro came along, Intel chips were given 36-bit memory address space to allow access of up to 64Gb RAM, using a mechanism called Physical Address Extension (PAE) (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Physical_Address_Extension).

While this does not permit a single process to access more than a 4Gb space, you can have multiple 4Gb processes running on the 32-bit OS.

Unfortunately Mr Microsoft never made use of this on its non-server OS' (see Windows Server 2003 and 2008 with PAE enabled http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/aa366778(v=vs.85).aspx), but with a Linux PAE kernal its an effective way of running a 32-bit OS on a system with > 4Gb memory.
 
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