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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.
The limit is created by the 32-bit integer limit (2,147,483,647), which is the largest possible integer that can be represented by 32 binary digits. In a computer with a 32-bit architecture, the memory address stored in one of the CPU registers will be limited to this number, thus the number of possible memory locations that can be addressed is ...
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.
However, "client" versions of 32-bit Windows (Windows XP SP2 and later, Windows Vista, Windows 7) limit physical address space to the first 4 GB for driver compatibility [16] even though these versions do run in PAE mode if NX support is enabled. Windows 8 and later releases will only run on processors which support PAE, in addition to NX and SSE2.
A 32-bit register can store 2 32 different values. The range of integer values that can be stored in 32 bits depends on the integer representation used. With the two most common representations, the range is 0 through 4,294,967,295 (2 32 − 1) for representation as an binary number, and −2,147,483,648 (−2 31) through 2,147,483,647 (2 31 − 1) for representation as two's complement.
For example, an 8-bit-byte-addressable machine with a 20-bit address bus (e.g. Intel 8086) can address 2 20 (1,048,576) memory locations, or one MiB of memory, while a 32-bit bus (e.g. Intel 80386) addresses 2 32 (4,294,967,296) locations, or a 4 GiB address space. In contrast, a 36-bit word-addressable machine with an 18-bit address bus ...
The number 4,294,967,295, equivalent to the hexadecimal value FFFFFFFF 16, is the maximum value for a 32-bit unsigned integer in computing. [6] It is therefore the maximum value for a variable declared as an unsigned integer (usually indicated by the unsigned codeword) in many programming languages running on modern computers. The presence of ...
On Microsoft Windows 64-bit, in a process running an executable that was linked with /LARGEADDRESSAWARE:NO, the operating system artificially limits the user mode portion of the process's virtual address space to 2 GiB. This applies to both 32- and 64-bit executables.