Am I missing something, or does the top answer not address the question? Memory tricks aside, it seems the questioner is asking whether the physical RAM itself will ever be used. Short of PAE, unless my understanding is wrong, I was under the impression that the answer to this is no.
Even with PAE, many Windows versions hard limit the available RAM to 4GB (or less). So his answer isn't even correct given the reality of many operating systems & hardware.
> Short of PAE, unless my understanding is wrong, I was under the impression that the answer to this is no.
PAE is used everywhere and has been around since 1995 Pentium Pros. So the answer is yes, a 32 bit OS/CPU can use 8 gigabytes (and more) of physical memory and an infinite amount of swap space. It all depends on the CPUs physical address size, not virtual.
My "64 bit" CPU has 36 bit physical addresses and 48 bit virtual addresses.
> My "64 bit" CPU has 36 bit physical addresses and 48 bit virtual addresses.
Just to clarify for anyone that doesn't catch what you mean and thinks PAE is the devil:
x86-64 CPUs must support in PAE when operating in long mode (64 bit mode). Further the version of PAE used is 'classic PAE' with an additional translation layer added to get some more physical address space. In other words even 64bit CPUs don't have a real 64bit physical address space, they still use PAE to access large amounts of ram.
