Leveraging 64bit adress space

I have been developing applications for 32 bit systems ever since I was 13. This year I got around my first 64bit app. Amazing. When the vendors introduced 64bit for common use (aka desktop and laptops) I started thinking "what hell of an app would use 64bit on a laptop". This app I got to work on was an index for data. Nothing too fancy. But very data centric. Since the goal was to have very fast operations on the index we had to tune a few knobs. One of the knobs is the addres space. Virtual 32bit address spaces. The principle is that you store a base pointer within your system and then reference everything from this base pointer. Not with 64bit but with 32bit. What is that any use for? Well if you have a tree structure (like and AVL or B-Tree) one of the main concerns is the node size. Since the nodes of a tree contain pointers to children the pointers are 64bit wide consuming more space than necessary. To get rid of this space consumption simply use the reduced address space. You can of course fit it to your personal needs in terms of space necessity.

Since the bottleneck between CPU and RAM will exist for the next N years (with N >>10 years) we still need to reduce the number of bytes pushed around between RAM and CPU. Reducing the size of pointers is one approach.