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

Imagine that “bit width” in a processor is *a little bit* like the ability to attach more wheels to a vehicle.

Going from one to two wheels is great! Many people can ride bikes that didn’t or couldn’t ride a unicycle. Two to four is a revolution again – now we have cars! Four to eight gets us some heavy duty trucks. Sixteen wheels, now we have full semi trailers with redundancy.

32 wheels…um well, hard to say what we’d do with that. 64 wheels? You’d lose everything to rolling resistance.

So it is with 64-bits. It is enough to use all the RAM we have figured out how to use so far. Adding more “bits” by itself does not increase performance, just as nobody benefits from 32 wheels on a truck yet.