[mastax]

What do you mean gaining popularity?

Athlon 64 came out in 2003, Pentium 4F in 2005. I'll concede that 32-bit Atoms were reasonably popular in certain market segments, but hasn't generally every consumer computer been 64-bit for over 10 years?

[Koshkin]

Sure, but the point has nothing todo with the availabilty or popularity of 64-bit CPUs. Rather, it has to do with the amount of memory deemed necessary in a computer. As far as I remember, Windows Vista, which was released into the wild just about 10 years ago, was predominantly 32-bit, 64-bit intalls, just like with XP, being more of a curiosity. Few consumer devices had more than 2GB of RAM back then.