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The term 64-bit also describes a generation of computers in which 64-bit processors are the norm. 64 bits is a word size that defines certain classes of computer architecture, buses, memory, and CPUs and, by extension, the software that runs on them. 64-bit CPUs have been used in supercomputers since the 1970s (Cray-1, 1975) and in reduced ...
Limits on physical memory for 32-bit platforms also depend on the presence and use of Physical Address Extension (PAE), which allows 32-bit systems to use more than 4 GB of physical memory. PAE and 64-bit systems may be able to address up to the full address space of the x86 processor.
The x86-64 architecture does not use segmentation in long mode (64-bit mode). Four of the segment registers, CS, SS, DS, and ES, are forced to base address 0, and the limit to 2 64. The segment registers FS and GS can still have a nonzero base address. This allows operating systems to use these segments for special purposes.
Further extensions may allow full 64-bit virtual address space and physical memory with 12-bit page table descriptors and 16- or 21-bit memory offsets for 64 KiB and 2 MiB page allocation sizes; the page table entry would be expanded to 128 bits to support additional hardware flags for page size and virtual address space size. [25]
32-bit versions of Microsoft Windows support PAE if booted with the appropriate option. According to Microsoft Technical Fellow Mark Russinovich, some drivers were found to be unstable when encountering physical addresses above 4GB. [16] The following table shows the memory limits for 32-bit versions of Microsoft Windows:
If you want to upgrade a system from Windows 10 32-bit to the 64-bit version, you first need to determine whether the processor has 64-bit support, 2GB of memory, or more, and whether the ...
Many 32-bit computers have 32 physical address bits and are thus limited to 4 GiB (2 32 words) of memory. [3] [4] x86 processors prior to the Pentium Pro have 32 or fewer physical address bits; however, most x86 processors since the Pentium Pro, which was first sold in 1995, have the Physical Address Extension (PAE) mechanism, [5]: 445 which allows addressing up to 64 GiB (2 36 words) of memory.
One of the major improvements the PCI Local Bus had over other I/O architectures was its configuration mechanism. In addition to the normal memory-mapped and I/O port spaces, each device function on the bus has a configuration space, which is 256 bytes long, addressable by knowing the eight-bit PCI bus, five-bit device, and three-bit function numbers for the device (commonly referred to as the ...