What do you mean by x86

Active Oldest Votes. Improve this answer. GajendraSinghParihar GajendraSinghParihar 8, 11 11 gold badges 33 33 silver badges 62 62 bronze badges. P5 Pentium's actual chip model number was still , I think. I forget if was ever official, but i was widely used e. But why 86? Why did a 16 bit processor get the number 86 in its name? One site said its the range of numbers the processor could handle, but I don't understand what that means. Wikipedia : The term x86 derived from the fact that early successors to the also had names ending in "86".

Jim Leggit Jim Leggit 49 6 6 bronze badges. Mostly only Microsoft and users of their software uses the term "x64". Everyone else e. Learn more about Collectives on Stack Overflow. The Overflow Blog. Podcast Explaining the semiconductor shortage, and how it might end. By clicking sign up, you agree to receive emails from Techopedia and agree to our Terms of Use and Privacy Policy. X86 is the term used to denote the microprocessor family based on the Intel and microprocessors.

These microprocessors ensure backward compatibility for instruction set architectures. Initially x86 started with an 8-bit instruction set, but then grew to and bit instruction sets. X86 microprocessors are capable of running in almost any type of computer, ranging from supercomputers to desktops, servers and laptops. The term x86 was coined as a result of the original Intel chip ending with the number The x86 processor had additional segment registers for accessing multiple data segments at the same interval.

It also supports an additional stack segment register and code segment register. The x86 processor can be converted to a high-speed processor by setting the virtual mode flag. The 32 bit processors are designed to handle a limited amount of physical memory maximum of 4GB but 64 bit can handle high memory utilizing 8,16 and some even32 GB. The 64 bit computers can run both 32bit programs and 64 bit programs.

Latest Laptops with pre-installed Windows are usually x64 i. Home versions of bit Windows do enforce a hard limit of 4 GB though due to licensing and driver compatibility reasons. It gets worse though for bit systems. Check out this write-up by Windows expert Mark Russinovich , where he reveals that Windows only gets to use 2. So what do you get with Bit? Well, as I mentioned earlier, you can access up to Each process in bit Windows gets more memory too. With bit versions, you only got 2 GB allocated to each process, but with bit versions, each application has access to 8 TB of virual memory, which is a considerable increase!

This comes in handy when you are do memory intensive things like video editing or using virtual machines. With bit systems, you also get backwards compatibility.