What does 4294967296 Mean in the Computer?
4294967296 is the total number of possible unique values in 32 bits. 32 bits is 4 bytes.
4294967296 equals 2^32
(How to Read Math).
People normally can't remember this number. Just remember it's 4 billion and something.
Examples
Integers
A 32-bit unsigned integer can be a number from 0 to 4294967295.
A 32-bit signed integer can be a number from -2147483648 to 2147483647.
Images
In an image with 8 bits per pixel per color channel in RGBA format, the total number of bits per pixel would be 32, since there are 4 color channels. RGB would be 24.
Memory
Old PCs had 32-bit CPUs. Such CPU would have an unique 32-bit memory address for each byte in memory, such as 0xBAADF00D
. Since the each address had a data size of 32 bits, that meant there was a maximum of 4294967296 addresses, and since each address addressed a byte, that meant the CPU could only use a maximum of 4294967296 bytes, or a bit more than 4 gigabytes.
The reason why you couldn't use more than 4 GB of RAM with such PCs was because of this.
IP Address
An IP address has a size of 4 bytes in IPv4, e.g. 255.255.255.255
. The total number of unique IPs in IPv4 is 4294967296 then. It's worth noting that some of these addresses can't be used, e.g. 127.0.0.1
is a special loopback address that you can use to access your own computer.
This is a bit worrying since there are more people in the world today than there are unique IPv4 addresses, and many of these people have more than one device connected to the Internet.
IPv6 uses 128-bit addresses which should be more than enough to solve this.
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