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, new operating system releases from all major vendors now enable 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.

Mathematica 5.2 pioneered all-platform support for 64-bit technical computing--implementing 64-bit memory addressing and 64-bit long-number partitioning. This first reflects Wolfram Research's leading porting capabilities as well as a commitment to delivering rapid support for the latest computing technology.

These enhancements make Mathematica the ideal platform for solving large problems:

	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.