The 64-bit CPU era has ushered in a raft of innovations and computing models that were impossible on a 32-bit system. With its 4GB memory limit, and about 1GB lost to the OS, 32-bit systems couldn’t do very much and often ran at about 5% utilization.

But with 64-bit CPUs, the sky’s the limit. In theory you can put 16 exabytes of RAM in a 64-bit system, which might get a little expensive. Machines with 128GB or more, though are becoming commonplace, ushering in the world of virtualization, cloud computing, in-memory databases and Big Data.

Big Data brings new challenges, however. The data sets might be too big even for a machine loaded with memory and simply don’t fit into the RAM even in a cluster scenario.

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