Why did 64-bit consoles come way before 64-bit home computers and OS’s?
In: 10
64bit means a lot of things. I think the n64 had some part of the graphics system that was 64 bits wide, everything else wasn’t.
For general purpose computing there is an expectation that the bulk of the cpu architecture be 64 bits: the registers (how many bits used in computations), the memory address space (how much memory can be addressed), and the memory bus (how much memory can be read in a single opperation).
There are cases where the bit size is different for design reasons. An example would be the intel 386sx processor. It has 32 bit registers and address space, but data was accessed 16 bits at a time. The 16 bit data bus was cheaper to build. Motorola did similar things with the 68000.
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