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Unread 07-22-2013, 02:54 PM   #6
Trod
Cooling Neophyte
 
Join Date: Jul 2013
Location: Mountain View
Posts: 4
Default Re: A post for postings sake

Ahh No - Opteron was not the first 64-bit CPU. It was arguably the first widely available 64-bit CPU (price wise) but it is handily pre-dated by Intel's Itanium (IA64), Sparc 64, DEC Alpha and plenty of mini and supercomputers going back to the mid 80's.

This being said, you are absolutely correct about PAE. It is worthless because of the reserved memory spaces required for addressing things like video memory or shadowing BIOS use so much of the high memory area that it doesn't make any significant difference.

Either way the bottom line is that a 64-Bit Intel CPU (consumer or server) won't show more than 3.5Gb of memory on a 32-bit OS without ill-advised tweaking of the kernel memory maps.
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