My oldest computer is nearly 20 years old and it can run Windows 64-bit just fine. In terms of graphics systems, both Nvidia and AMD have both discontinued 32-bit support. In the way of operating systems, even Apple and most mainstream Linux distros have discontinued 32-bit support (or have a timeline to do so). Today, only Microsoft Windows seems to be holding out, but as we all know, Microsoft technically has been pushing out a new release every 6 months, while slowly (arguable, sometimes silently in the way of performance hits) pushing out higher system requirements for those releases. At one point does anyone suspect that Microsoft will end support or at the very least, stop developing a new release for 32-bit systems?
Years ago they said 32bit will be discontinued soon but later they needed it for the low end/mobile systems.
i think i can give partial answer, well it's i dont know when. i have been using linux for some times. even though that linux kernel is hybrid (assuming it's compiled that way), meaning both 32bit and 64bit. in order to run 32bit programs then user needs 32bit libraries and dependencies. and same for 64bit. basically it means if i install 64bit debian without multi-architecture it cannot run 32bit programs at all. (these assumes processors fully support 64bit). windows has something similar with a catch. 64bit windows has windows-on-windows, or wow64. this practically means 32bit windows only has 32bit components but 64 bit windows has 32bit and 64bit components. this leads to a point, because microsoft still have to support 32bit programs for compatibility, it means they have to update and support those 32bit components namely wow64. and beacuse wow64 is still supported it's not difficult to continue supporting 32bit windows versions. btw, on a server side, microsoft dropped 32bit versions long time ago. 32bit windows may provide some minor benefits in rare conditions like, less than 4GB of main memory, 32bit windows still have limited compatibility layer for 16bit programs.
Q: When will Windows 32-bit be discontinued? A: when all the CPU companies stop creating CPUs with 32 bits compatibility.
some devs say it not worth the trouble to switch their apps to 64bit. which is true in some cases. plus 64bit tends to use more memory among other things as actually causing some apps to run slower. and in some cases they would still have to provide support for 32bit while supporting 64bit at same time costing more. plus windows 64bit uses more memory compared to 32bit. and no point running 64bit windows on a device that only goes to 4gb memory. some window tablets are like this.
When they will be forced to. Microsoft tried to scared them by announcing, that Vista will be 64-bit only, then 7, then 8, then MS gave up. Windows XP 64-bit sure did.
Till right now, still most Developers creating 32bit Applications, some of them both 32bit and 64bit, some just 32bit! There also quite a bit of 'Low' Power Devices just using 32bit CPU's. And as long as that production goes on, 32bit will be kept alive!
If 32 bit support gets removed from Windows x64 then it will shave off like 2.5 GB of space or even better. Or at least they should give us the option to remove the WOW64 library that's assuming that Windows doesn't have any 32 bit apps //OneDrive is still 32 bit. Why the f**k Apple can do it but Microsoft don't..
Apple has a pretty small, pretty controlled environment. Microsoft has an open environment that's out of anyone's control. Most of that environment is still 32bit (on application or library level). You cannot compare the two.
20 year old computer that runs ISA that has existed for 15? First x86-64 CPUs were released in 2003. Killing 32bit Windows would also mean killing NTVDM (DOS) and WoW (Windows 1-3.1 16bit apps). Legacy never dies and enterprise customers rely on these features to keep ancient applications running. I'd speculate that MS will only keep 32bit Enterprise LTSB at some point to serve those customers. These days even cheap phones come with 4GB of RAM so I think resource-starved tablets will no longer soon be an issue. 32bit support in on 64bit as WoW64 will remain even longer, there's 25 years of apps to keep running. On servers you can disable WoW64 support (since WS2016). Linux and Mac don't worry much about compatibility. Linux mentality seems to be to fix source and recompile that doesn't work well in real world commercial tools. Mac/Apple IMHO just doesn't care about anything older than maybe 5 years.
I still have a machine from around 1991 (386SX-20MHz, 8MiB RAM) that can barely run 32bit. Even older 16bit and 8bit machines are still running for historic and legacy purposes. Yes, legacy is hard to kill as long as you still find spare parts...
Whoopsie, of course, a typo. I'm so used to write RAM in GiB these days. I don't think a 2GiB SIMM module ever existed. Short explanation for the younger members: SIMM, contrary to DIMM, usually needed to be plugged in sets of four identical modules. And they did cost a fortune.
Why do you use the nomenclature GiB (Gibibyte) instead of GB (Gigabyte)? Serious question, I know that the two differ a little in size.