PAE means "Physical Address Extention" which is a capability provided by IntelPentium Pro and above CPUs (including all Pentium-series processors except the original Pentium and the Pentium MMX) which allows for up to 64 gigabytes of memory to be used in 32 bit systems, given appropriate operating system support. PAE is a 36 bit memory addressing system, although memory segments still use only 32 bit addresses, resulting in a maximum size of 4 gigabytes per segment, and thus for each application that uses the flat memory model.
