Windows Licensing
Posted By matt on August 26, 2009
So, this guy noticed something I noticed some years ago – that MS doesn’t allow the full amount of memory addressable by hardware to be available under Windows. Now, he basically says that he believes that MS is doing it for license reasons. He misses one serious supporting point: they do this with the 64 bit versions as well.
See? They had a pricing structure for available memory versions on 32 bit systems which basically organically falls from the general “we had to add PAE to hit more than 4GB of memory” and they didn’t want to lose that, so they added it to later versions of Windows. Specifically:
- There is no technical reason for server 2008 to have a tiered memory structure of 32GB/128GB/2TB
- There is no reason that Vista Home has tiered memory limits of 8GB and 16GB, and that it requires Business to hit 128GB.
- Windows Server 2003 has an even greater number of variants.
Meanwhile Linux can address 64TB of memory, though the various chipsets may limit that.
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