• @[email protected]
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    01 day ago

    Negative, Pentium 4 was x86 and thus could only address 32 bits.

    64bit CPUs started hitting the mainstream in 2003, but 64bit Windows didn’t take off until Win7 in 2009. (XP had it, but no one bothered switching from 32b XP to 64b XP just to use more memory and have early adoption issues. Vista had it, but no one had Vista).

    • @Blue_Morpho
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      1 day ago

      The Pentium 4 supported PAE and 36 bit PSE

      https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Physical_Address_Extension

      https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Physical_Address_Extension#:~:text=This article needs additional citations,may be challenged and removed.&text=In computing%2C Physical Address Extension,the operating system enables PAE.

      It’s kind of like how the 8086 was a 16 bit processor but could access 1 megabyte of ram (640k ram 384 k reserved for rom) . -Or the 286 which was 16 bit but could access 24 MB.

      But even without that the Prescott P4’s supported 64 bits.

      • @[email protected]
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        51 day ago

        All of that was introduced in 2004. When you said “25 years ago” I assumed you meant the original P4 from 2000.

        • @Blue_Morpho
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          12 hours ago

          PAE was introduced with the Pentium Pro 30 years ago. I used it on Dell Pentium II servers that ran SQL Server. Even the 386 from 1985 could access 64 terabytes of ram using segmented mode.

          Full 64 bit Prescott P4 was 2004.

      • @486
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        119 hours ago

        While technically true, the P4 did support PAE, in reality you couldn’t really make use of it on consumer hardware for most of its lifetime. No ordinary socket 478 mainboard with DDR1 memory supported more than 4 GB of RAM. With socket 775 more RAM was possible, but that socket is “only” ~20 years old.

        Besides that, there were other even newer systems that supported only 4 GB of RAM, like some Intel Atom mainboards with a single DDR2 socket. Same with Via C3 mainboards.

        • @Blue_Morpho
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          112 hours ago

          Oh sure. But as I said, that’s the motherboard’s fault, not the cpu.

          • @486
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            19 hours ago

            Then I don’t understand what your point is. A CPU on its own without a system isn’t of any use. Since there were no motherboards allowing you to use that much RAM, the point about the CPU supporting it is moot as far as I am concerned.

            • @Blue_Morpho
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              9 hours ago

              Because the meme blames Intel.

              Imagine if I did a meme that blamed AMD for only supporting DDR4 because my motherboard only did DDR4 despite all AMD 7000 and newer supporting DDR4 or DDR5…