Why did the console bit wars end? During the 32 bit era, PS1 and Saturn were 32 bit systems, and Nintendo was boasting about having a 64 bit system. The last time console makers boasted about bits in their system was the sixth generation, with the Dreamcast, GameCube, and PS2 being 128 bits.

Question

Why didn’t the bit war continue into the seventh generation? Why didn’t the amount of bits double to 256 bits like they did in past generations? Any insight into this would be appreciated.

In: 609

Answer 1

For very short, the console bit war ended for 2 main reasons:

1) There is no point on going over 64 bits, as the power needed for the instruction calculation would be greater than the advantages of carries. Even 128 bit systems are actually 32 bit devices using parallel computation.

These bit indicate the lenghts of the single instruction that can be recalled by the CPU directly. Marekting gimmicks instead worked on showing how big was the system bus (the data highway connecting the main parts of the system).

2) Standardization of game development was a push for the end of the bit wars, and generally the hardware-wise console war. The push of using similar SDKs for the games on different devices to hasten the game publishing and development led to a “flattening” in the variance of the game inner electronics.