4GB memory for Windows: just waste money?

[The Edge of the Ice]

On Tue, 14 Sep 2004 10:06:48 -0700 (PDT), Frank Peng
<frank_peng_01-/E1597aS9LQAvxtiuMwx3w at public.gmane.org> wrote:
> Lennart,
> 
> I thought Windows is 32bit OS. So it should be using
> 4GB memory instead of you said 3GB memory.

Windows will make use of all 4GB of RAM, but any SINGLE
application cannot, because part of the 4GB address space
allocated to each process is taken by the system (buffers,
system calls, etc).  Even Linux has to deal with this kind of thing,
though there are options when compiling your kernel that you
can tweak if you know that you'll be using a lot of RAM (e.g.
database applications), and you can get up to 3.5GB of
application RAM this way.  There are 32-bit machines that
can take more than 4GB of RAM, by using a bank switching
scheme.  This is analogous to the old EMS/XMS memory
extenders in use in the old 16-bit DOS days.

Getting more than 3/3.5/4GB of RAM _per_application_
is one of the big reasons for going to 64-bit in this day and age.

-- 
taa
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