this post was submitted on 15 Jul 2023
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doesn't a 32 bit OS cap memory usage at 4GB per process not for the whole system?
Sort of, it depends on implementation. There are some techniques (which I don't really know) that will allow a 32 bit OS to address more than 4GB, but natively it can't for the same reason that the process will still be limited to 4GB.
Perhaps you already know this but: 32 bits can only represent 2^32 numbers (4.294.967.296), which is how many bytes 4GB is equivalent to, and so anything after that cannot be reached. This also means 64 bits can address up to something like 17 billion GB, or about 16 EB.