What determines the maximum RAM capacity a processor can handle?

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What determines the maximum RAM capacity a processor can handle?

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Anonymous 0 Comments

There is a good article on Wikipedia with the details, but at its simplest, a 32-bit processor can’t make use of memory addresses longer than 32-bits

Assuming that memory is addressed on a per byte basis that gives a limit of 4GB (2^32 Bytes)

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

You could access more memory without using longer address, by increasing the size of a block from 1 byte to 2 or more, but there are many instances where that becomes troublesome, and you’d need a more complex processor of you want to be able to do byte level operations, when memory is read and written in 2byte or 4byte blocks

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