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

128 bit consoles don’t exist. Everything from the ps2 generation forward is 64 bit. The number of bits is the word size of the CPU in the system. It hasn’t grown past 64 bits because 64 bits is enough. It’s a bit hard to describe exactly why, but one example is with a 32 bit CPU you can only address up to 4 gigabytes of memory, so your system essentially can’t have more than 4 gigs of RAM. With a 64 bit CPU, you can address something like 18.5 billion gigabytes of memory. We don’t have a reason to go past 64.

Edit: Correction, the PS2 Emotion Engine is KIND OF 128 bit, but near as I can tell not properly. It doesn’t work directly on 128 bit integers it works on multiple smaller integers at once.