Heh. Ask anyone that's ever edited maps for games, edited video, rendered, or used Photoshop if they want the ability to use more than 4GB of memory for a single process.
There are many games now with multi-gigabyte files; the ability to map that entire file into memory is invaluable if the system has enough memory to support it.
There's also a difference between "required" and "desirable". Many applications will happily run with less than 4GB of memory available to them, but many will also run much better when they can access more.
Don't fall into the same trap that so many did with 32-bit processes, etc. Look forward a few years and see where the industry is eventually headed anyway and just assume that it should be there now.
I'm just going to assume I worded my post poorly. I pointed those out and identified them as niche markets, because they are. Some how it appears the impression I gave was "there is no need for 64bit, ever!!!!!".
I believe that the disconnect here is that you are claiming the need for >4GB of RAM per process is a "niche market", while many others here are claiming it is something that many applications today would have an immediate use case for, and/or have to work around not having available.
There are many games now with multi-gigabyte files; the ability to map that entire file into memory is invaluable if the system has enough memory to support it.
There's also a difference between "required" and "desirable". Many applications will happily run with less than 4GB of memory available to them, but many will also run much better when they can access more.
Don't fall into the same trap that so many did with 32-bit processes, etc. Look forward a few years and see where the industry is eventually headed anyway and just assume that it should be there now.