Notes on 32 and 64 bitComputer manufacturers are in the process of converting their products from "32 bits" to "64 bits", and operating systems are providing support for these new capabilities. We now have "32-bit Windows XP" and "64-bit Windows XP-x64" and so forth.
It is important to realize that these descriptions do NOT refer to arithmetic precision, but to the size of the addresses manipulated by the computer, and therefore the amount of RAM that can be addressed by an application.
FlexPDE has used 64-bit floating point arithmetic since its inception.
There is no difference in the arithmetic processing of FlexPDE on "32-bit" and "64-bit" operating systems, only in the maximum amount of memory that can be used.
32-bit versions of FlexPDE will run equally well on 32-bit and 64-bit operating systems.
64-bit versions of FlexPDE require a "64-bit" computer, such as the AMD64 or Intel Xeon or Pentium with EM64T extensions.
Windows platform specific:
Memory addressing limitations for 32-bit versions of FlexPDE are governed by the characteristics of the Windows operating system.
- On 32-bit Windows XP and Vista, the addressable memory limit is 2GB.
- On 64-bit Windows versions, the addressable memory limit for 32-bit FlexPDE is 4GB. Memory addressability for 64-bit FlexPDE is effectively unlimited.
(Microsoft information about this issue is confusing and conflicting).