I plan to run 32-bit Windows XP on a workstation with dual processors, based on Intel's Nehalem microarchitecture, and triple channel RAM. Even though XP is limited to 4 GB of RAM, my understanding is that it will function with more than 4 GB installed, but will only expose 4 GB (or slightly less).
My question is: Assuming that 6 GB of RAM is installed in six 1 GB modules, which physical 4 GB will Windows actually map into its address space?
In particular:
Will it use all six 1 GB modules, taking advantage of all memory channels? (My guess is yes, and that the mapping to individual modules within a group happens in hardware.)
Will it map 2 GB of address space to each of the two NUMA nodes (as each processor has it's own memory interface), or will one processor get fast access to 3 GB of RAM, while the other only has 1 GB?
Thanks!