64-Bit Platform Support

Mathematica 5 allows full access to nearly a million terabytes (billion gigabytes) of memory addressable on 64-bit machines. 32-bit architectures and previous versions of Mathematica are limited to 4 gigabyte addressing. This limit has become significant in the increasingly large calculations now being run with Mathematica.

The combination of a 64-bit address space and fast numerics, part of Wolfram Research's gigaNumerics initiative, lets Mathematica users solve very large problems.

Mathematica 5 is optimized for a large number of 64-bit CPUs and operating systems, including Sun Solaris for UltraSPARC, HP-UX for PA-RISC, IBM AIX for the Power architecture, HP Tru64 Unix on Alpha, Linux on Alpha, and SGI IRIX on MIPS. The two main benefits are the ability to solve vastly larger problems than on 32-bit platforms and the speed increases for big-number arithmetic due to the 64-bit word length.

This 64-bit optimization will also let Mathematica users take full advantage of planned performance increases in future versions of these 64-bit processors.

Other Links Mathematica 5 Optimized for 64-Bit Computing on IRIX (News Release) Mathematica Plaform Availability