Physical Address Extension

In computing, Physical Address Extension (PAE) allows for up to 64 gigabytes of memory to be used in 32 bit systems, given appropriate operating system support. It is a capability provided by Intel Pentium Pro and above CPUs (including all Pentium-series processors except the original Pentium and the Pentium MMX) which PAE is a 36 bit memory addressing system, although memory segments still use only 32 bit addresses, resulting in a maximum size of 4 gigabytes per segment, and thus for each application that uses the flat memory model.