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>In other words, even by the turn of the century, the software was still moving to 32-bit

However, there were 64-bit Sparc, Mips and Alpha systems

Arguably these processors adopted 64-bit a little "too early" because they still couldn't support over 4 GB of RAM and people couldn't afford it anyway. However servers did hit the 4 GB limit much sooner than PCs which motivated server-oriented RISC processors to go 64-bit before the PC-oriented x86.