Computer technologies are constantly evolving and this evolution will continue to grow for many decades. This evolution is not only happening in software but also in hardware as both of them has to go hand in hand.
x86 is a very old technology that started with the 8086 family of processors. It has now evolved into the x86-32 version which is the most common version and its successor the x86-64 or more commonly known as x64. Its move towards a gradual shift to x64 has started quite early while there were still no major drawbacks seen in the pc market. This is because the first market to experience the problems related to x86 was those who run high-end servers.
Running a system that has 32bit architecture means that you are always limited to what 32bits can point to. A 32bit long pointer could only point to a maximum of 4.2billion addresses which is just about 4GB of memory. This means the processor can only allocate up to 4GB of memory to a certain program even if 16GB of memory is available. This limitation may not be a problem for a home setup but in a server environment, it presents a huge problem. That’s why x64 processors appeared very early for the consumers.
The x64 architecture still follows what x86 has but it improves on it by having 64bits in every address. This means that the memory capacity of the x64 architecture is the square of 4.2billion, which for now is an unimaginable amount of memory. That coupled with certain enhancements makes the x64 architecture a certainly great processor to replace its predecessor.
The advantage of x64 architecture is that it has backward compatibility with x86. So even if your operating system is 32 bit, users won't notice any difference in functionality. And once the 64 bit OS or software arrives you can just update it without upgrading hardware.
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