64 bit processor

Why did the Nintendo 64 processor need to be 64 bit when the console only had a maximum of 8 MB of RAM?

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m.youtube.com/watch?v=nxuna944dls
n64.icequake.net/mirror/www.white-tower.demon.co.uk/n64/
lmgtfy.com/?q=why is the n64 64 bit
sega-16.com/forum/showthread.php?27087-Micro-64-Feature-Nintendo-64-Vs-Sega-Saturn/page44
coursera.org/learn/comparch
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cuz its faster than a 32 bit processor with 8gb of RAM?

r-right?

The same reason why did the PS2 had to be '128 bits'.

what are people like you even doing on Sup Forums ?
no one will bother to explain it to you because you wouldn't understand it anyway.

I will understand if you can explain it. Can you even provide a link that explains it?

I'm sure I'm not the only person here that wants to know.

It's probably similar to why they call chips with 16-bit memory spaces 8-bit units.

...

Back in the 90s there was a 'bitwar' between the console manufacturers. None of us kids really knew how the fuck it worked or why more bits was better we were just convinced more bits was better coz marketing strategy.

To the console manufacturers It didnt matter whether it offered any techical benefit it just had to have more bits to impress the kids. Some even lied about what bit count they had via tricks with the architecture. (See atari jaguar.)

What's the point? As a child I had no idea what hardware my Nintendo 64 was running on. I wanted my parents to buy one for me so I could play games.

Is there any evidence that the CPU in this device was actually 64 bit? At no point do I recall the need to install greater than 4GB inside my unit.

I'm pretty sure the N64 is not actually 64bit in the sense you're thinking of OP

In what sense is it 64 bit? 64 bit floats? Arithmetic on 64 bit integers?

>What's the point?
The point was school yard arguments about which console was best. I remember having a fist fight over the N64/PS war.

I have a degree in computer science, I too don't know everything.

The point was SNES was 16 bit and looked way better than NES which was a fucking measly 8 bits.

minimum of 64 bit instruction length

The nvidia Pascal architecture is 4096 bit

>I remember having a fist fight over the N64/PS war.

so? did the fatter kid win?

It is to get more computation done in one cpu cycle. Not just for memory pool addressing.

Was it useful as says?
For a marketing point it was.

Technically it depends how the architecture was built up.
But nowadays the console makers went back to x86 or x64, even to arm.

>Nintendo 64

Notice how nintendo actually called it that in the first place? Most of their titles for the console were Whatever 64 as well. Thats how bad it got. Isnt that the proof in the pudding?

the 64 bitness of the processor wasn't used that much

No. I won and it made an unrelated little girl watching cry. The honor of the PS was protected that day.

maybe they gave it 64bit architecture because they were hoping to constantly advance their cpus to the point where they would actually need more than 4GB of memory?

i mean weve had x86 processors forever but we only really maxed out the ram situation a few years ago.

>It is to get more computation done in one cpu cycle
In what specific way? raw 64-bit integer operations? SIMD instructions? 64-bit floats? Please elaborate on this detail.

maybe the graphics co-processor had the ability to deal with 64-bit floats

Has anyone written or looked at a N64 emulator and seen where the 64 bit component is?

what a waste

m.youtube.com/watch?v=nxuna944dls

The cpu was actually underclocked and the system was usung a 32 bit memory interface.
Somewhat strange.
n64.icequake.net/mirror/www.white-tower.demon.co.uk/n64/

Marketing.

Post your rigs.

...

that kid deserved it, the ps is objectively better than the 64

...

Anyone remember pulling their controllers apart and putting them back together with different colors? It was heaps annoying getting all the buttons back in place and getting the circuit board to fit correctly.

man i miss these days

what went wrong?

the 64 has better games

This. There are many aspects to the bitlenghts of a machine. It can be wordsize, arithmetic, instruction size, etc.
I don't know the answer to the OP question, I always thought it was more of a graphics/sound bitlength. (eg something like 64-bit color or audio (however audio is supposed to encode))

wrong

I have the grey one and a fire orange one

wrong

because it was made during a time where consumers were being told that "MOAR BITS = BETTER"

lmgtfy.com/?q=why is the n64 64 bit

Asking why Nintendo makes their decisions on hardware is like asking why the handicapped kid eats glue.

FPS games beat out platformers and Nintendo stopped using good hardware after the Gamecube, which means no third-party support.

...

Doesn't really seem comparable, the N64 is apparently a "real" 64-bit processor, while the "128 bits" in the PS2 was for SIMD, which means it couldn't natively handle data of 128-bit size. Actual 128 bit values are kind of pointless in 99% of situations, since 64 bits already gives us signed integers up into the single-digit quintillions, you're not going to need anything that big outside of scientific computing, at which point you might as well use proper bignums.

it's not like N64 was using custom CPU architecture. It was MIPS64, very similar to those in SGI workstations.

>while the "128 bits" in the PS2 was for SIMD, which means it couldn't natively handle data of 128-bit size
depends how you count

Wronger

I think I did that.

>being condescending towards someone who wants to be educated

This is first thing I see after my drastic decrease in browsing gee. Never change user. F

I remember the N64 having the ability to calculate 64 bit floating point operations, where as the ps1 only able to do 32 bit integer operations. Thats why Mario 64 looks relatively smooth, where as Metal Gear Solid looks jagged and blocky.

The CPU is 64 bits though.

>The processor is able to operate in either a 32bit or 64bit mode and includes both a 64bit integer data execution unit and a 64bit floating point unit.

n64.icequake.net/mirror/www.white-tower.demon.co.uk/n64/

3D on the PS2 looked worse than on the N64

>Thats why Mario 64 looks relatively smooth, where as Metal Gear Solid looks jagged and blocky.
nothing to do with it
mario64 looks smooth because;
- the N64 has trilinear texture filtering
- mario64 has fuckall textures in the first place, largely relying on gouraud shaded polygons
both of these can be done on 32bit systems (gouraud shading is done on the ps1 in some games as well)

We don't "need" anything.
Large bit width is nice because you get better control of the numbers.
I don't know what they did with the large bit width, but it is never "pointless"

That caused the shake or wobble in the PS1 geometry. The graphics data could only be passed in integers.

The blockiness of the PS1 textures was due to the fact that it didn't have texture filtering or dithering.

An n64 texture could be just as blocky, but the hardware dithering smeared it out.

Nintendo 64 is literally a reddit console

Fuck off.

RE4 on the PS2 looked worse than an n64 game?

ps1 did have texture dithering
most of the "weirdness" of the ps1's 3D was due to not having a Z-buffer
the texture "warping" seen on angled surfaces is due to using affine mapping

Advertising bits back then was like advertising tflops now, marketing most normies not knowing what the hell it means but they want more of it.

Because most MIPS chips worth a shit were already 64-bit for years at the time and there were a ton of attractive embedded options that some SGI engineer more knowledgeable than you or I presumably decided were far better than using some shitty ancient R3000 derivative or similar. On top of that, it was great for marketing, and maybe in an edge case where for some fucking reason a game was working with >32bit values they could handle them in a single load, block of operations and store instead of multiple.
No, the R4300 is fully 64-bit as a "derivative" of the R4000/MIPS III ISA.

FIGHT FIGHT FIGHT FIGHT

I never really noticed texture warping... but then again I never played too many games on the PS1.

If the PS1 did have texture dithering, it sure as shit didn't do much.

Dude it looked like an NES game.

Here are a few examples of Mario and Banjo with PS1 texture.

sega-16.com/forum/showthread.php?27087-Micro-64-Feature-Nintendo-64-Vs-Sega-Saturn/page44

You know what RAM is for right? CPU cache is more important you knowm, for the CPU

>trilinear texture filtering
>texture filtering
>affine mapping
>Z-buffer
>texture dithering
What is all of this?

Is there a list of rendering methods available where I can learn about the historic development of graphics?

plz stop.

Because with MIPS CPUs, 64-bit is basically a strict superset. There is no good reason not to use it unless you're being a cheap ass. You can use a 32-bit address space if you want. If you really need it though, you can manipulate 64-bit integers in one instruction (although not necessarily one clock cycle) for some fast math on... particularly large integers.

The PS2 did not use a "128 bit CPU". It had 128 bit SIMD registers, but those aren't exactly general purpose. Even if you had the RAM for it, you could not dereference a 128 bit address on a PS2.

Many 8-bit CPUs had 16-bit address spaces, and used two registers to hold a memory address. It would be extremely limiting to have only 256 bytes of memory.

64-bit general purpose registers, possibility of 64-bit address space.

No. All MIPS CPUs, regardless of whether they are 32-bit or 64-bit, have a fixed instruction size of 32 bits.

Since no one gave you a real explanation I will.
64 bits means there is 32 more bits than a 32 bit processor. Which is obvious. But, what does it mean?
As you were implying in the OP yes ofcourse it means you can use more address space but what else?
If you have more bits to compute on your computah you can do more calculations in a second. That means you can show more shiny things on a display. Which in turn means you can have better graphics and that's all you need to know about this.
Next time just use google and stop posting stupid threads like this on Sup Forums. It really triggers the autists here and they will just lie to you until they reach orgasm.

n64 games tended to have lower resolution textures than ps1 games, for 3 reasons;
1. the N64 has a 4k limit for textures
2. making an N64 game smaller meant cheaper (to produce) carts, so games were made as small as possible
3. the trilinear filtering made lower resolution textures more useful/usable

>ps2
dude, we're talking about ps1 here

Weird really because FPS games are dogshit with controllers. I don't blame Nintendo for going with the lowest common denominator market since the Wii though, they had to carve a niche with Sony and Microsoft owning so much of the market. I kinda miss my GameCube still.

What should I read if I want to know more about processors and how they work?
I know almost nothing.

>someone actually took the time to run a wind model of this
>used computing cluster time
special software
>most of this cost quite a bit of money
Our hard-earned tax dollars at work, everyone.

>>used computing cluster time
>special software
>>most of this cost quite a bit of money
yea, na, these days there's free software that can be run on consumer hardware that can do that

Any laptop could compute that.

Bumping for this. I want a year-by-year listing of when these technologies/ideas became implemented in hardware/software.

Enroll into this course: coursera.org/learn/comparch
It is insanely good, professor skips all the boring newbie bullshit for 5-year-olds and jumps straight to the modern i7-level shit. Very complicated, too. If you'll be overwhelmed with all the information - just download the lectures and watch them in your free time, this course won't be open forever and you'll regret not saving this enormous amount of knowledge.

>Bumping for this. I want a year-by-year listing of when these technologies/ideas became implemented in hardware/software.
just look them up on wikipedia
by todays standards, these are really basic things, and are explained by many (and most of them aren't difficult to understand)

unlike some more modern graphics techniques, these are just "obvious" things which were around for a while, just waiting for hardware to get fast enough to do in real time, rather than a complex solution to get more out of already-fast-as-shit hardware

>"obvious" things which were around for a while, just waiting for hardware to get fast enough to do in real time
on a side note, we haven't exhausted the list of "obvious but too resource intensive for realtime" things
see: raytracing

(and 'realtime' just means fast enough to generate frames fast enough to convey motion, like a video game, unlike an animated film)

v.s. this on the N64? Please... PS2 can't compete.

Nintendo did a very silly thing by routing all hardware through the CPU to access memory. That is the GPU, Sound chip, Video-output decoder, etc. all have to ask the CPU for RAM access. In a normal system, each piece of hardware will have either a dedicated amount of memory (GPU) or direct access to the RAM.

I'm not sure there was ever an explanation for why they did this. I think it was to simplify the ability to upgrade memory with the RAM expander. But this is why the CPU ran at 100Mhz and benefitted from the 64-bit address space/instruction set.

How is a 64-bit address space beneficial in any way within a 8 MB RAM context?
Surely you can have arithmetic operations on 64-bit integers / floats without having to resort to a 64-bit address space?

pffft, window case and LEDs, reference expansion pak. Coulda put that money towards an s-video cable
I still have a blue and red one.
there's a plug in for pcpsx-r that fixes all the textures

sure you can, 64-bit address is not even used, typically it's something like 24-bits physical address only. But 64-bit bus width can feed the CPU with machine word types in one memory access.

Get a wii, it's pretty much a gamecube on steroids and with less bottom side ports

Why is the amount of RAM relevant? RAM is not a prerequisite for using a larger address space. The Japanese engineers did a lot of unorthodox things back in the 90's.

The system bus was actually 32-bit, and the RAM was accessed using a 9-bit BUS meaning you had to do multiple requests to read/write a 32/64 bit address (hence the higher clock speed for CPU). It's possible that they added 64-bit support to future-proof the console should the need arise.

wait what, you couldn't load 64-bit GPR from memory? are you serious? maybe hardware would issue 2 reads transparently to a programmer?

You could, you were just bottlenecked by the RAM BUS. No telling if Nintendo's dev-kit did the work for you or not. But workarounds to this, and custom implementations for a lot of other stuff are why N64 emulation remains pretty difficult to perfect.