AWE does not require PAE, though PAE makes it much more useful

This article discusses the Address Windowing Extensions (AWE) feature in Windows and its relationship with Physical Address Extension (PAE). It explains how AWE can be useful even without PAE, but highlights the limitations of using AWE on a 32-bit system with only 4GB of RAM.

From the article

The Address Windowing Extensions (AWE) is a feature of Windows that allows programs to allocate physical memory and map them on a page-by-page basis into a region of address space (the “address window”). PAE is the Physical Address Extension, which is a feature of the x86-32 CPU that allows a 32-bit processor to generate physical addresses larger than 32 bits, thereby allowing it to access more than 4GB of physical motherboard RAM.

Some time ago, I noted that AWE does not require PAE . The two features operate independently, but they are useful together.

If you use AWE without PAE, then your 32-bit Windows system can access only 4GB of onboard memory, so the feature of AWE that gives you access to lots of physical memory is of limited use: The system has only 4GB of memory to begin…

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