The bit depth of the processor is the number of bits in the numbers it processes. This technical characteristic of the processor is one of the most important and determines its performance.
The bit size of the processor is the number of bits in the numbers it processes, written in the binary number system. This technical characteristic of the processor is one of the most important because it determines its performance.
Therefore, it was so important for designers to increase the bit depth of processors. Modern personal computers use 64-bit processors. But this was not always the case, the first Intel microprocessors in 1970 were only 4-bit.
To make it clearer what is at stake, it is necessary to talk a little about what the binary number system is, what bits are and how they are related to the processor capacity.
Without going into details, computers process information by loading binary numbers from RAM into the central processor, processing them, and writing the result back to memory.
The computer industry is based on the binary number system. In ordinary life, we are accustomed to using the decimal number system, where all numbers are written in ten digits from 0 to 9. The binary number system uses only two numbers to write numbers: 0 and 1.
When stored in memory, each digit of a number is stored in a separate memory location. These units of measurement of information in the binary system are called bits.
Each processor processes numbers that have a certain number of bits. A digit is a "workplace" of a digit in a number. For example, in the usual decimal number system, the digits are called tens, hundreds, thousands, and so on.
The more the number of digits, the greater this number. In this case, each digit of the number is written in the place corresponding to its category.
Each bit of a number in binary form is used to write one bit of that number. Each cell of the processor's RAM stores one bit, which stores one digit of the number. It turns out that storing large numbers requires a large number of bits and processor memory for them.
The maximum number of bits and bits in numbers that a processor can work with is called the processor capacity.
The bit depth of the processor primarily affects the speed of the processor with data, because the bottleneck that constrains the growth of the processor's speed is the speed of data transfer between the processor and the memory. And the more bits the transferred numbers have, the more these numbers are and the more information is transferred at a time between the processor and the memory, the higher the processor's speed.
