Jargon Watch: Which Desktop Computer Buzzwords Matter?

One of the challenges in the world of desktop computers is keeping on top of the technical jargon — new technologies are developed so fast that it's everything you can do to understand enough about the latest buzzwords to figure out that you don't care. (It's a challenge for me, and I've worked in this field for twenty years!)

We'll assume, just for laughs, that you know enough about the basic terms in personal computers, enough to get by, anyway. Here are a few hot topics that have come up in the past year or so to help confuse you, along with enough definition to help you figure out how much you need to pay attention.

64-bit — Real and "Extensions"

The usual computer you have on your desktop right now is a "32-bit" system — that is, the CPU (the computer "chip") operates on data in 32-bit wide chunks. In the past couple of years there's been a push to move on to 64-bit chips — thanks to mysteries of binary math, 64-bit-wide chunks of data processing power is not just double, but massively greater than 32-bits — don't even bother trying to figure it out. Let's just say that a computer with a 64-bit processor can count the US National Debt — to the penny. That's a lot of digits. Mostly we don't need to track data that large, but some jobs — mainly manipulating very large databases, processing extra-ambitious 3D games, and decompressing large video files — do get a benefit. So Intel launched a new type of chip, the 64-bit Itanium, to handle this — but as it's completely incompatible with existing 32-bit software, it's been tough getting developers to rewrite their applications to 64 bits, so Itanium sales have been slow, slow, slow.