Annotations on 64-bit operating systems support

Information for Release 6.4 to Release 2016-A

Last update: March 2016 / Release 2015-B

The support of 64-bit operating systems started with Release 6.4.
However, at that time almost all dSPACE programs were native 32-bit applications.
Only hardware drivers, for example, were adapted to 64-bit.

Since Release 2013-A there are separate DVDs for 32-bit and 64-bit. 
But in this case 32-bit and 64-bit mainly refers to the MATLAB support.

dSPACE products without any MATLAB support, e.g., ControlDesk Next Generation,
are still contained only as 32-bit version.

You will find detailed information about this in the Software Installation and Management Guide of the respective Release, chapter Limitations for Products on 64-Bit dSPACE DVD. 

Since Windows is executing native 32-bit programs in a so-called WoW64 subsystem (Window-on-Windows64),
each process may theoratically use up to 4GB of memory. In contrast to that on 32-bit Windows versions the memory space for all processes is limited to 3.2GB.

For this reason a 64-bit operating system also improves the performance
when working with large models under RTI or TargetLink in a 32-bit MATLAB version, for example.

Below please find a more detailed description of the advantages of 64-bit Windows versions
even in conjunction with native 32-bit software. 

Information as of Release 2016-B

As of dSPACE Release 2016-B, all products will be available only as 64-bit variants.