64-Bit Computing

Across all major platforms, Mathematica now supports 64-bit memory addressing and 64-bit long number partitioning--both industry firsts that reflect Wolfram Research's commitment to delivering rapid support for the latest computing technology.

Traditionally, operating systems have been 32-bit: able only to provide unique addresses for less than 2³² bytes, or about 4.3GB of memory. Instead, Linux and new operating system releases from Microsoft and Apple utilize 64-bit addressing--making the memory limit 2⁶⁴ bytes, or about 18,000,000,000GB, although current hardware will only support a lower limit such as 2⁴².

With Version 5.2, Mathematica is now the ideal platform for solving large problems on all major operating systems:

• Its 64-bit support means that there's effectively no memory barrier.
• Long numbers are now broken into 64-bit rather than 32-bit lengths for processing, enabling better performance.
• Sparse and packed array technology introduced in Mathematica 4, 5.0, and 5.1 made computations highly memory efficient.
• Computational speed-ups beginning with Mathematica 5 have improved some calculation times as much as 1000-fold.
• Optional grid versions of Mathematica are available to distribute computations in parallel over multiple processors or computers.

At installation, Mathematica automatically detects whether to install the 32-bit or 64-bit version.