bits

[Olitron]

In days gone by, 'bits' were the be-all-and-end-all of the home consoles. The Mega Drive had a huge boastful '16-bit' label on the front and the Nintendo 64 got much of its marketing appeal from advertising the fact that it was an unprecedented '64-bit' console and promptly stuck 64 suffixes to all it's good games.

But why does no-one care about bits anymore? I'm hearing that X-Box is only 32-bit, making it on the same level as the PSX, while the Gamecube is just two 64-bit chips stuck together or sommink. What are bits? Do they contribute at all tot he power of a console? And if they don't, why did games companies make such a fuss about them in the good ol' days when trying to push their respective consoles?

Please help me! ft:

[stroppa]

I think it's all about the graphics chip-sets and processor power these days, rather than 'bits'.

the DC was also two 64-bit chips mashed together.

[MartyG]

The definition of N-bit processors has become a bit convoluted, and now manufacturers quote the biggest bit size they can, often these are quite misleading.

The definition regarded as the most accurate in computer science circles, is the width of the regular integer registers.

So not:

External bus width
Floating point or special register width
Instruction size

As for the Dreamcast, the data bus width is 64 bit (floating point bus is 128 bit), however, integer register width is 16 bit - making it a 16 bit processor.

Not 100% sure about the Gamecube, but I believe that has 32 bit integer register, making it a 32 bit processor.

All of this isn't really so important anyway. There are many factors that affect the speed of a machine, such as 1st and 2nd level cache size on processors or graphics cards, data and address bus widths and speed, processor pipelining, memory speed and size, and probably loads more I haven?t thought of. It can get very complicated indeed.

Regards
Marty

[Valken]

Some people consider the "bit" of a chip being the width of it's data bus while others consider it to be the size of its internal registers and the size of the instructions/numbers it can handle.

Back then average joe games players used it to guage how good a machine was but these days no one cares as long as the games look as they would expect them to.

edit - oops... in a moment of severe blindness I missed the above post.

[Super Stu]

What Marty said. The whole "bit" thing was nothing more than willy waving. For instance, carts were quoted in megabits, rather than the more usual megabytes, presumably to make them seem bigger. Lot of nonsense, really.

A few years ago DEC used to make the worlds fastest processor, the Alpha. It is 64bit risc, if memory serves. Now, I hear current gen machines, such as PS2, trumpetted as 128bit etc. In terms of raw horsepower, the Alpha would still rain all over it. I also understand (need to check) that Intel now have the 'fastest single cpu' crown now, presumably with one of their 32bit jobs.

Bits - misleading nonsense, when applied to gaming.

[Olitron]

Cheers for the info guys, interesting stuff.

So the GBA and GC both use a 32-bit processor, eh?