What does win7x86 mean?

The operating environment of this tutorial: windows7 system, Dell G3 computer.

win7x86 means the 32-bit windows7 operating system.

Windows7 systems are divided into 32-bit and 64-bit systems, and X86 is another name for 32-bit systems.

X86 actually means 32bit, which is a 32-bit mirroring system. Then X64 means 64bit, which refers to a 64-bit operating system. We can open "Control Panel" - "System and Security" - "System" - "System Type" in order. On the page, we can see whether our computer is an X86 or X64 system.

Computer digit description

The computer uses binary encoding to represent numbers, characters, instructions and other control information. When a computer is storing, transmitting or operating, a set of binary codes as a unit is called a word, and the number of binary bits in a word is called the word length.

The word length is one of the main technical indicators of the CPU. It refers to the number of binary digits that the CPU can process in parallel at one time. The word length is always an integer multiple of 8. Usually the word length of the PC is 32 bits, 64 Bit.

32-bit and 64-bit represent the maximum number of bits that the CPU can process at one time. The CPU of a 32-bit computer can process up to 32 bits of data at a time, which is 4 bytes of data, while a 64-bit CPU can process 64 bits of data at a time, which is 8 bytes of data.

Comparison of 64-bit and 32-bit

The change from 32-bit to 64-bit architecture is a fundamental change, because most operating systems must be completely modified, to gain the advantages of the new architecture. Other software must also be ported to take advantage of the new capabilities; older software is typically supported through hardware compatibility mode (new processors support older 32-bit versions of the instruction set) or software emulation. Or implement a 32-bit processor core directly in a 64-bit processor (like Intel's Itanium processor, which contains an x86 processor core to execute 32-bit x86 applications). Operating systems that support 64-bit architecture generally support both 32-bit and 64-bit applications.

The obvious exception is the AS/400, whose software executes on a virtual instruction set architecture called TIMI (Technology Independent Machine Interface), which converts low-level software into native machine code before execution. Low-level software must be completely rewritten to move the entire OS and all software to the new platform. For example, when IBM moved the older 32/48-bit "IMPI" instruction set to 64-bit PowerPC (IMPI is not at all like 32-bit PowerPC, so it's much better than moving from a 32-bit version of the instruction set to a 64-bit version of the same instruction set The scale is even larger).

The 64-bit architecture can undoubtedly be used in applications that need to process large amounts of data, such as digital video, scientific computing, and early large databases. There has been much debate over whether its 32-bit compatibility mode will be faster than equivalent 32-bit systems in other tasks. In x86-64 architecture (AMD64 and Intel 64), major 32-bit operating systems and applications can run smoothly on 64-bit hardware.

Sun's 64-bit Java virtual machine starts slower than 32-bit virtual machines because Sun still assumes that all 64-bit machines are servers and only implements "server" compilers for 64-bit platforms (C2). The "client" compiler (C1) produces slower code, but compiles faster. So although a Java program on a 64-bit JVM will perform better over a long period of time (typically long-running "server" applications), its startup time may be longer. For short-lived applications (such as the Java compiler javac), increasing the startup time can control the execution time and make the 64-bit JVM slower overall.

It should be noted that speed is not the only consideration when it comes to 32-bit and 64-bit processors. Applications such as multitasking, stress testing, and clustering (for HPC) may be better suited for 64-bit architecture to be deployed correctly. For the above reasons, 64-bit clusters have been widely deployed in large organizations such as IBM, Vodafone, HP, Microsoft.

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