220-1002 · Question #233
Which of the following is the memory limitation of a 32-bit OS?
The correct answer is C. 4GB. A 32-bit operating system uses 32-bit memory addresses, giving it 2^32 unique addressable locations. That equals 4,294,967,296 bytes, or exactly 4GB. This is a hard architectural ceiling-regardless of how much physical RAM is installed, a 32-bit OS cannot address more than 4GB…
Question
Which of the following is the memory limitation of a 32-bit OS?
Options
- A16MB
- B2048MB
- C4GB
- D1024GB
- E2TB
- F8TB
How the community answered
(56 responses)- A7% (4)
- C88% (49)
- D4% (2)
- E2% (1)
Explanation
A 32-bit operating system uses 32-bit memory addresses, giving it 2^32 unique addressable locations. That equals 4,294,967,296 bytes, or exactly 4GB. This is a hard architectural ceiling-regardless of how much physical RAM is installed, a 32-bit OS cannot address more than 4GB (and in practice, even less is available to applications due to reserved system space). Moving to a 64-bit OS removes this limit.
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