I've been researching the memory address capacity of a 32 bit operating system and have not found out why it only recognizes 3 Gb when the theoretical max is 4 Gb. Theoretically a 32 bit system should recognize 4 gigabytes and a 64 bit system should recognize 16 exabytes (16,000,000 Gb). My question is "where is the extra Gb?"
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3 Gb 32bit OS
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3 Gb 32bit OS
Sager NP5792Alienware M11x-R1WUXGA Glossy11.6" WXVGA Glossy2.4GHz Core 2 Duo1.3GHz CULV Core 2 Duo OCed to 1.76GHzGeForce 8800GTXGeForce GT 335m4,096 DDR2 667 Memory4,096 DDR3 800 Memory200 Gb 7200 RPM SATA 150128 Gb GSkill Falcon SSD64 bit Vista Home PremiumMicrosoft Windows 7 Home PremiumTags: None
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One possibility is reserved address space for memory-mapped drivers file IO operations and such.
Looking at this MSDN article it looks like it's an arbitrary software limitation, but perhaps it's imposed in order to achieve 1:1 mapping of virtual to physical address space (faster gaming possibly?).
Just some semi-educated guesses.
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