AMD64 Memory Models

Alfred Huang, January 22, 2006

I recall the first production quality compiler I worked on was for an 80286 in the mid 80s. Memory model such as "small," "medium" and "large" with common extended keywords "__far" and "__near" were popular with that 16-bit segmented memory architecture. Thereafter, 80386 "linearized" the address space with its 32-bit pointers and the model-related terms simply became obsolete and disappeared.