MICROMINE says the next major release of its exploration and mine design software, Micromine 2020, will no longer support installation or use on computers with a 32-bit processor.

There are a number of technical reasons why the company has made this move, mainly revolving around the ability to access more RAM, MICROMINE said.

Thirty-two-bit processors are limited to 4 GB of RAM, which is starting to become a limitation to functionality in Micromine, especially in some of the future development projects the company has planned for users, the company said.

Additionally, the development effort to support both 32-and 64-bit processors was high and impacted on the company’s ability to deliver new functionality to MICROMINE’s clients, it said.

MICROMINE’s decision follows closely on the heels of graphics card producer, Nvidia, announcing it was ending support for 32-bit operating systems in April last year.

Mark Gabbitus, Strategic Product Manager for Micromine, said: “We surveyed all of our regional offices, prior to making this decision, to ensure that this would not significantly impact our clients. We appreciate that there are probably a few older computers out there with 32-bit processors running Micromine that will need to do a hardware upgrade but we felt that the time was right to make this move.”