PAE means you have longer physical addresses, but pointers are always virtual addresses. That is, the difference is only visible in the layout of the page table

PAE means you have longer physical addresses, but pointers are always virtual addresses. That is, the difference is only visible in the layout of the page tables. Segment+offset is something else, but even on 32-bit x86 the segments were almost always set to base 0, and AMD64 dropped most of the segment mechanism. The exception on both is using segments to access thread-local data, but even then it's used just as an offset into the same flat address space.