Windows 32 bit vs 64 bit usage figures?

[Mike Fishcake]

Does anyone have any idea on the ratio between the usage of Windows 32bit and 64bit editions?

We've got a few people asking questions at work about it. Basically, we want to convince some people who look after a specific service that it's not realistic for them to say "sorry, we only support 32 bit versions" by showing them figures regarding the ever-increasing adoption of Windows x64 systems.

I'm looking for 2 things mainly:

The first thing I'm looking for (and I don't know if this is asking too much) is some sort of sales figures showing the difference between sales of Windows 7 32bit editions and Windows 7 64bit editions (including retail and pre-installed).

Secondly, it would be interesting to see if there was any way of gathering existing usage statistics on 32bit vs 64bit OSs. I had a look at google analytics to see if it differentiates between 64bit and 32bit windows 7, but it doesn't unfortunately.

Any ideas anyone? I've obviously had a google around, but can't seem to find anything that breaks it down that far.

[Funkstar]

The percentage of 64bit vs 32bit systems currently in use is going to be tiny. New systems will be different, but I still don't think it will be as much as you imagine.

Laptops ar the big sellers these days and they are still not coming with over 4GB of RAM. Most are 3GB, probably so they customers don't buy 4GB but only see 3.5GB.

I doubt this will change until mainstream systems are selling with 6 or 8GB. And Windows7 just doesn't need that kind of memory.

[kalniel]

Gamer breakdown is quite well shown by looking at the latest steam hardware survey, but gamers only make up a small proportion of the market and aren't representative.

[Mike Fishcake]

Hey, any figures at all are welcome!

[Mike Fishcake]

Just been digging around a bit more, and whilst I can't find any actual sales figures, I have noticed some quite interesting info gathered from a scoot around laptop manufacturers' websites based on what they're selling now aimed at the home/consumer market.

Dell and HP's laptops are virtually all based on Win7 64 bit edition, apart from their netbooks, which use Win7 starter edition.

Toshiba's entry level stuff seems to be approximately 50/50 64bit and 32bit, but their higher end stuff is mostly 64 bit.

Acer seem to be listing mostly Vista based systems on their site (it's not immediately apparent whether they're 32 or 64), which is a bit of a surprise.

I'll update this thread with any more findings, on the off chance that other people are interested

[Funkstar]

I'm actually a little surprised at that Mike, I expected it to be predominantly 32bit still.

[Mike Fishcake]

I'm actually a little surprised at that Mike, I expected it to be predominantly 32bit still.

I've been having a little look at the corporate sales side of things too, and I've noticed that Dell and HP (haven't had the time or inclination to do any more digging around) seem to offer mostly 32bit on their super-cheap business desktops, and a choice of pretty much everything from Windows XP Pro 32bit upwards for everything else. It would be interesting to see the breakdown of what these companies are actually shipping though.

I've also been having a look at PC World's website for reference, but from the ones I've looked at, they don't mention 32 or 64 bit, and I know for a fact that one of the models they list is definitely a 64 bit OS, so that's not a massive help.

[TheAnimus]

I would play the politician.

Include ALL operating systems, and only look at the servers as i'm guessing its some enterprise product?

Remember all win7 PCs that can support 64bit do by default there was some agreement iirc, this means even ATOM powered things like the aspire revo come in 64bit by default!

[dangel]

I'm actually a little surprised at that Mike, I expected it to be predominantly 32bit still.

It's spec/marketing driven - lots of stuff being sold with 4gb of RAM now and that means you need 64bit.

[Fraz]

You might find the Valve/Steam December 2009 hardware survey figures quite interesting. Obviously it's a very gamer-oriented survey, and hence the machines in the survey are probably a bit better than the average user's. Nonetheless, it's a massive sample, and the figures show that only about 26% of users are using a 64-bit OS:

http://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/

Edit: Here it is inline:

Windows XP 32 bit (-3.20%) 44.77%
Windows Vista 32 bit (-0.27%) 20.71%
Windows 7 64 bit (+2.45%) 15.61%
Windows Vista 64 bit (+0.81%) 10.00%
Windows 7 32 bit (+0.02%) 7.45%
Windows XP 64 bit (+0.19%) 0.64%
Windows 2003 64 bit (+0.04%) 0.64%
Windows 2000 (-0.01%) 0.10%
Other (-0.03%) 0.08%

Another Edit: Oh... someone already mentioned it.

[badass]

You might find the Valve/Steam December 2009 hardware survey figures quite interesting. Obviously it's a very gamer-oriented survey, and hence the machines in the survey are probably a bit better than the average user's. Nonetheless, it's a massive sample, and the figures show that only about 26% of users are using a 64-bit OS:

http://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/

Edit: Here it is inline:

Windows XP 32 bit (-3.20%) 44.77%
Windows Vista 32 bit (-0.27%) 20.71%
Windows 7 64 bit (+2.45%) 15.61%
Windows Vista 64 bit (+0.81%) 10.00%
Windows 7 32 bit (+0.02%) 7.45%
Windows XP 64 bit (+0.19%) 0.64%
Windows 2003 64 bit (+0.04%) 0.64%
Windows 2000 (-0.01%) 0.10%
Other (-0.03%) 0.08%

Another Edit: Oh... someone already mentioned it.

Looks like Win 7 64 bit's outselling 32bit 2 to 1 for gamers. Good news

[aidanjt]

the figures show that only about 26% of users are using a 64-bit OS

Only? 26% is a considerable volume of users. And it's not as if x86_64 is the 'latest buzz craze' which will go away shortly.

[Mike Fishcake]

I would play the politician.

Include ALL operating systems, and only look at the servers as i'm guessing its some enterprise product?

Remember all win7 PCs that can support 64bit do by default there was some agreement iirc, this means even ATOM powered things like the aspire revo come in 64bit by default!

I'm not entirely sure of the complete technicalities behind it, but basically the client for our Cisco based VPN service isn't available for 64bit systems, which means users with Windows x64 have to use a third party client. We're still trying to convince the team that look after the VPN to come up with some sort of support policy other than "Sorry, we don't support 64 bit systems / 3rd party software", which is why I need as much ammo as possible. We already have an increasing number of support queries raised, but having additional facts to strengthen our case will hopefully be an advantage. It's not the VPN support team that have to deal with annoyed/frustrated users. :-/

I've asked a few people at our place who have direct contact with people like Dell and Toshiba, to see if I can get any info out of them. Maybe a long shot, but you never know!

[singdollar]

I think the market are still focus on 32bit OS because most of the software are design to operate in 32bit OS. I agree Mike Fishcake that the Cisco VPN is now support 64bit system and it is kinda frustrating.

[tfboy]

I think it'll depend on your sampling.

If you only want to include new PC sales over the last year or so, the 32/64 ratio will be a lot closer than if you want to survey over every single PC on the planet where 32bit quantities will be millions times more than 64bit.

Also, a lot of older PCs cannot be upgraded to 64bit due to lack of hardware support. I have some hardware that's only 5 years old or so, and there's no 64bit driver support