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

Anything past 64 bits is going to be useless for a very long time.

The key thing larger bitness helps you with is accessing storage space: the count of bits refers to the maximum number of “digits” you can use to address memory. Imagine a street number locked to two digits long. You’d be able to talk about only 100 houses. If you added another digit, you’d be able to talk about ten times the houses of the original, since that new digit could have ten values.

In computers, as you might have heard, we have binary, so each digit can only have two values. So, 33 bits is double the space of 32.

So, compared to 32 bits, 64 bits is doubling the storage space 32 times. It turns out that 32 bits gets you around 4 GB of memory, which ended up not being enough around the late 2000s. 4 GB doubled 32 times is probably going to be enough for the next century, at least.

We don’t even use all that space today. Modern processors are theoretically designed to use 64 bits, but in practice they’re all locked to 48. We simply don’t need the extra.