My point did not pertain to aesthetic qualities of PAE but rather to a limitation of Intel CPU chipsets that imposed a maximum memory constraint (either out of

My point did not pertain to aesthetic qualities of PAE but rather to a limitation of Intel CPU chipsets that imposed a maximum memory constraint (either out of marketing microsegmentation or engineering reasons), the practice that has persisted for years onwards and upwards, and was likely the catalyst for the PC laptop vendors to start soldering the memory chips on. Lastly, running 3Gb processes (which Linux supported and Windows did not) on a ultra-portable laptop was not really a thing in 2008, and who was going to win the 64-bit x86 flavour battle (AMD or Intel) had not become clear yet.