Friday, October 31, 2014

memory - How much RAM can a 32bit OS support?






I see a lot of people claim that 32bit OS can only support up to 3GB RAM, and other people claim 3.25, while others claim 3.5, and others even claim 4GB (Which makes the most sense to me: 32^2 bytes = 4GB)


Can anyone provide a definitive answer with some logic to back up their statement? How much RAM can a 32bit OS support?


Answer



As a matter of theory, 2^32 is the max. However, each OS reserves different parts of the memory space for various things (kernel space, drivers, memory structures, etc) so the usable user space and sometimes reported RAM is less than the theoretical max.


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