8-bits is What?
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- Опубліковано 10 кві 2023
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8-bit, 16-bit, you've probably heard these terms in relation to classic games? Is it based on real technological terminology, or is it just marketing gibberish?
The 64-bit N64, the 16-bit Super Nintendo, what does it mean when games systems are catagorised like this?
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Correction Older CPUs at a logic level can only add. They used ether a register reserved for negatives or a flag to modify the registry, and couters to do all other operations.
SEGA referred to the size of addressing in the General Purpose Registers. ATARI, SONY, NINTENDO, and NEC went by the width of their graphics pipeline.
Hey great stuff. What shooter game was being shown at the 24:43 mark?
How about no?
The funny (or tragic?) thing about the Jaguar's 68k is that it was only there to read controller inputs. But developers who were unwilling or unable to get the most out of Tom and Jerry (the 32-bit chips) over-relied on the one familiar component they saw in the chaotic mess that was the system's architecture.
68k made the jaguar even more complicated as the jaguar chipset. It made the jaguar look like suped up 4th gen console. Atari made a big mistake and should've used 68020 or 32-bit risc cpu
Yeah, this was interesting. The 68K as you said, was actually added to the Jaguar to use as a manager/controller processor. It was NOT meant to be used as the actual CPU. That was the "Tom" processor's job. But the messy architecture led most developers to use the 68k as the CPU. I do kind of disagree with his statement that Jaguar wasn't 64-bit. The system did have a 64-bit bus as well as two 64-bit graphics accelerators (the Blitter and Object processors). So it was 64-bit in some ways.
@@MoonScythe1 that's fair. I think people were fast to call out the Jaguar by only looking at the processors. But by then, the "bits" were difficult to truly qualify as architecture kept changing so drastically.
@@AltimaNEO Absolutely. I think the Jaguar was the console to wake people up that "bits" does not determine the power of a console. It did for me anyway when I was 12 lol.
Isn't a 68.000 a bit too much to just handle the inputs? Couldn't they have used a cheaper MOS/Zilog CPU?
The SNES CPU breaks down 16 bit operations into two 8 bit ones. The advantage is that it doesn't have to fetch two instructions from memory... But the PC Engine's very similar CPU runs so much faster that it does 16 bit operations quicker anyway.
That's because the 65C816 is a 16-bit datapath extension of the MOS 6502, and the PC engine uses a modified version of the 6502 (from wikipedia) that isn't 16 bit. The funny thing is that the 6502 was made by the 68k's designers (originally pin compatible but was sued by Motorola), so also 16 bit.
@@alext3811 The 65C816 is also an extension of the 6502. It doesn't have a 16 bit "datapath", it is 8 bit internally. 16 bit instructions just use microcode to make the ALU do two 8 bit operations back to back. It only supports 64k of address space too, with a bank switching system similar to what the PC Engine uses. As I said, literally the only advantage it has is that the microcode means it can eliminate one fetch from memory, but since the PC Engine CPU can run at more than twice the speed, actually more than 3x what most SNES games use, that advantage is entirely negated.
The 6809 is an example of a more 16 bit-like CPU. While the bus is 8 bit and so is most of the ALU, it does have hardware multiplications support, which was a common feature of 16 bit CPUs. Only for 8x8 multiplies though.
@@kuro68000 Thanks for the correction!
Why is memory in the older pcEngine clocked at 8MHz ( twice that of SNES ) ?
@@ArneChristianRosenfeldt NEC decided to allow for much faster ROM than Nintendo did. Not clear why, maybe N had been burned by the ROM shortages that lead to the creation of the Famicom Disk System. Maybe they thought it wasn't worth it, but slowdown in many SNES games suggests that it was worthwhile.
Could also have been a technical issue. The other parts of the system have to support and 8MHz bus, and the CPU has to be capable of that clock rate. NEC had its own fabs to produce chips, and a history of producing high end ones. Nintendo relied on others to make their parts, so higher costs and maybe only access to older processes.
Back in the magazine days the PC-Engine (Turbographics 16) was called an 8 bit system by all the magazines (at least in my country).
In fact, they frequently went on about how this little 8bit system had such good graphics (sometimes they called it a hybrid system, but never a flat out 16bit one).
Which is ridiculous. Because the Amiga 500 and Atari ST are 16bit and the PCE can out class them.
@@TurboXray Well, the Intellivision is a 16-bit console. Bits is not about horsepower. Its about one thing: The bit width of instructions that the CPU can read. That's all!
@@TurboXray the number of bits are only relevant when programming, otherwise it's just marketing buzzword. That "bit" thing on 90's consoles was just a vague sound and graphics categorization, which is a stupid way to use this computer metrics.
Take the so-called "8bit" era: we talk about the visual quality of the NES and the SMS but on the same time most 8 bit computers from the 70-80's didn't have such advanced graphics capabilities. Same with "16 bit" consoles compared to the same processor on a personal computer.
Also the number of bits doesn't tell how powerful a system is. Some bus might be halved but the frequency and the instruction set can provide equal or even better performance. Same with RAM speed and quantity. Coupled that with advanced features like FPU, cache levels or multithreading and the gap between a decades-old chip compared to a modern one with narrower address bus or registers can be quite significant.
I'm no stranger to nerding out on computers but this is the first video that finally made me understand what the hell the bits are really about! Wonderful video, cheers, mate!
Thanks!
Great video. What got me interested in how computers work was when I was 14 and my friend told me my Dreamcast wasn't 128bit but actually 32bit. My mind was blown and I refused to believe it. Sure enough he was right and I saw the world through clearer eyes ever since.
And marketing still hasn't changed in all those years.
@@harrkev With the only difference that they use tearaflops instead of bits now. Although, to be fair, Microsoft seems the only console manufacturer that still cares about this stuff.
And I'm not sure they'll still do in the future after Series X's " -most powerful console- ", ops, we meant "most powerful Xbox" fiasco.
Modern graphics cards have even exceeded to 512 bits (8x 64 bits), and PCs have instructions at 512 (AVX-512, unaware of any AMD extensions that meet or exceed) as well. Of course, they still talk to components at 64 bits (albeit with multiple lanes (PCIe/CXL, Infinity Fabric, etc), and are probably 64bit internally. As Intel can attest (Pentium 4, Itanium ( aka Itanic), etc), bits don't mean everything.
@@harrkev You mean full self driving isn't fully self driving yet?
Basically, things started to get real complicated real fast as technology developed. In addition to data and address buses, you also have the internal processing structure: different registers holding different data sizes, and different logic/execution units and pipelines able to handle those and perform operations on them. So, you had processors doing things like 32-bit signed integer operations in one part, 64-bit floating point operations in another, SIMD operations on multiple pieces of 16-bit data, and so forth.
8-BIT CPU's weren't the first generation of CPU's. You're forgetting the very first CPU, the Intel 4004, which was 4-BIT.
IBM PC with 20-bit address bus, 16-bit data registers and 8-bit data bus: 16-bit computer
Amiga with 24-bit address bus, 32-bit data registers and 16-bit data bus: 16-bit computer
Either the IBM PC was an 8-bit computer or the Amiga was a 32-bit computer. It can't be both.
Moral of the story: the "bits" of a system is creative marketing fluff without any real objective definition.
Seriously, your videos are some of the best tech videos I've ever seen. Every time your channel comes out with a new video, I have no choice but to at least see part of it. Keep up the good work!
20:54
About the Neo-Geo being 24 bit: The 68000 has a 24 bit address space... And the MVS Also had an 8 bit Zilog Z80, along side the "16-bit" 68000. This is the same setup that the Sega Genesis had! The AES was basically a more powerful Sega Genesis, since the Genesis itself was just copying arcade hardware.
The AES is for all intents and purposes the internals of an arcade cabinet crammed inside a console and its cartridges, which is why it resembles the Genesis. The Genesis was trying to bring the arcade into the home, and so was the AES. They both have the same design philosophy.
Even funnier, is that the marketing at the time derived the 24 bit from combining the bits of the two CPUs... Which is what the Atari Jaguar got in hot water over, just some years later!
The point of all this is that, even if the bits do actually matter to processing power and memory limits, how these systems were marketed was almost completely divorced from the actual specs of the machines.
I always enjoy the informative nature of your videos pal. I also enjoy a fellow Englishman's take on retro gaming as well. Thanks for the awesome content Sharopolis!
I like your Dharma station logo.
Thank you for watching!
Great explanation, thank you. All I knew growing up was 16 bit is double the bits, so that means it's good
Glad it was helpful!
The main differences between the various generations of game consoles really comes down the audio and video chips and what their capabilities are. The 8 bit systems were largely confined to 16 color (with rules) graphics and primitive sound chips limited to a few 8 bit "voices"
The 16 bit machines were capable of displaying between 64 and hundreds of colors, often with rules.
The 32 bit systems were capable of displaying hundreds of colors without rules and with primitive 3d capabilities.
in fact, the audio was usually limited to 4-bit or less on the 8-bit systems
@@jc_dogen What do you mean by that?
@@tarstarkusz bit depth
@@tarstarkusz I mean you have 4-bits of volume at each sampling point that makes the sound wave.
What's a rule here?
Part of the reason SNK marketed the NEO-GEO as 24-bit is that in addition to the Motorola 68K it's also packing a Zilog Z80 as a coprocessor... Which is itself crazy to think about if you grew up in the era of 8-bit microcomputers. The reason for the 24-bit wide data bus and it's real claim to being a 24-bit console however is SNK's custom graphics chip.
[nods silently in atari jaguar]
The Genesis also had a 68000 and a z80 processor.
@@johnchase7667it was imo, the one thing it had on the snes (some people prefer the gen's sound, i am not those people)
i think only a handful of games suffered from slowdown whereas the snes was known for it.
@@zachw2538 I'm definitely not one either, my personal audio chip tier list goes like this: Amiga>SNES>C64>Mega Drive>, but over the years I noticed how similar the MD sound is to many iconic arcade games, they must have used the same sound chip.
@Zach W Interesting you should say that. The SNES had its own 8-bit coprocoessor that was arguably at least as fast as the Genesis Z80 despite only running around 1MHz. It was like a 6502 but with a lot of enhancements that can give a significant speed boost.
I feel at least twice as educated (and confused) than before I fired up this video 🤣
Fantastic production! Thanks for putting in the research and time to whip up this masterpiece!
Dreamcast and PS2 were the end of the "bit wars," as Dreamcast touted 128 bits, PS had to call theirs 128 because Sega did so with the DC. Though, once the DC failed, everyone seemed to forget about the bit-ness of systems, and for good reason. Bits was often associated with graphics and how good the games looked and by the time the PS2 and Xbox came around, the games looked so good, that graphics weren't leaving much of an impression on people as they once were in the 90s.
From what I understand, Dreamcast was only marketed as 128-bit in Japan. The same is probably true for PS2 as well. Maybe Sony called it 128-bit once or twice, but it was never marketed that way here in the US. Not even in it's earliest days.
People still put graphics above everything to this day I prefer gameplay tho
@@JMFSpike Late reply, I know, but I have a Dreamcast from the US, and it says right on the box that it has "128-bit graphics".
@@3dmarth Oh, that's interesting. When did you get your console? Was it close to launch? I'm not a Dreamcast expert by any means, so I was just going by what I'd heard.
@@JMFSpike Nope, it was in 2006!
I was seriously into Sonic Adventure DX on GameCube at the time, and had just learned that the Dreamcast version had unpatched bugs that could be used to score faster times- on top of looking and being very different from the version I was used to.
I picked up a used, but CIB, Dreamcast on eBay, along with a few games. Sadly, I didn't build up an especially great collection, and now my DC's optical drive has quit, but I still had a lot of fun at the time.
Aw, you’re back! Fantastic!
You’ve quickly turned into my favourite channel, um, person, mate. Brilliant how you explain all this stuff to us non-techies and make sense of it all.
Thanks! I've not really been away, but these videos take a while.
@@Sharopolis oh sure. I get that. I just got carried away one day a few weeks back and ended up watching all your videos again in the background whilst I was at work and was very sad when it was over. Keep up the good work!
Unexpected Big Car cameo at 1:19!
Love his videos. 😊
Also, that chirping noise in the background around 4:12 is driving me crazy... lol
Sorry!
It's just the snare on the drums track I think :P
I believe that most n64 games executed in 32 bit mode to reduce the memory requirements. The system used unified RAMBUS memory that had high latency and the object of contention between all the various processors. Best to keep the data footprint as light as possible to keep things from choking.
Raid shadow legends only on its 4th year but it feels like 8 years of ads
"This could take a while"
Missed the chance to say "this could take a bit" 😂
18:30 It's very interesting point! HuС6280 is slower per cycle than 68000 in MegaDrive, but it is much much more efficient per clock and actually better in performance.
And more - GPU of PC Engine slightly worse in capabilities that MegaDrive's GPU, but SuperGrafx version is much much better in capabilities than any "16 bit" system.
It's actually amazing how HudsonSoft designed that system. It's very unique artifact of that era.
Problem with the SuperGrafx is that it didn't have very many games at all. It almost feels like a waste of hardware and I would have loved to see some developers utilize it.
PCE GPU slight worse in some aspects (ok, the missing 2nd bg layer) but definitely has aspects that better than the MD (not just colors either).
68000 can share memory for extra fast software rendering on Mac and ST. But with whom does it share it on the MD?
As always, a very informative video! Now I want to see how CPUs get produced... Interesting stuff!
It's mostly done with machines now. The days of hand-designing every transistor on a die were over like 40+ years ago.
@@jd9119 indeed, but I want to see the steps of work!
Regarding the '8-bit computer' generation, there was one notable exception during then as the TI-99 had a 16-bit CPU; albeit a pitful one (TMS9900).
And it was hampered by the whole GROM system that was originally supposed to run everything through graphics memory, as well as a lousy rendition of BASIC. Homebrew programmers are getting great things out of it lately in assembly, though.
Another great video, keep them coming!!
Lovely explaination, thanks!
N64 was much more capable then playstation, but it got screwed over by how small texture cache was and by RAM latency. That meant, devs had to use much lower resolution textures and relly on antialiasing build in. Also it did not help that cartridges were limited in capacity in compare of CD.
Atari Jaguar fans are going to have strong words about this lol 🤣. It has some pretty good games though.
There are dozens of them. Dozens!
with programming you have datatypes like: 'bytes' (1 byte), integers (2 bytes), longs (4 bytes), long long (8 bytes).
Now if you know 1 byte = 8 bits, you can do the math how we come to 64 bit.
it is just how quickly a processor can crunch these large values.
So with the example long long (in my programming language its called a ''currency'') = 8 bytes x 8 (bits) = 64 bits.
And there you have it, with 64 bit (which are just values of 8 bytes (of a byte datatype), and dont think its just 8 numbers in row like 12345678 with a max value of 99999999, these bytes are being calculcated with math by a computer (1 byte can have a value from 0 to 255)) numbers you can plot a map to the stars.
Where with 32 bit (4 bytes, a datatype Long in other words) your computer would be to slow to calculcate these huge numbers. And this is also the reason why there isnt a need for 128 bit computers, because with 64 bit numbers you can calculcate basicly everything you need already (a 64 bit value can hold a value up to many terabytes, where a 32 bit value can store up to 2 GB limits, you know what i mean). Or 4 GB if unsigned datatype where you dont use negative values.
BUT, the universe is even bigger as 64 bit values, so eventually if we want to go further we need more powerfull processors too. But trust me, in our lifetime NASA never gonna need numbers larger as 64 bit, and if they say they do they hallucinating.
Its not that a computer processor would not know how to deal with 128 bit numbers, but it would take to long because of the many extra cycles it has to make to the CPU to store the value. Even a 32 bit computer can work with 64 bit numbers, but it is much slower because CPU has to do much more cycles to work with these large numbers.
A 32-bit number can count up to maximum: 4,294,967,296 (if you break this down you need 4 bytes storage for it = 32 bit (this can represent 4 Gigabytes).
A 64-bit number can count up to maximum: 18,446,744,073,709,551,616 (if you break this down to bytes you will need 8 bytes = 64 bit (this can represent 16777216 Terabytes).
If you want to use 128 bit (16 bytes) values at Windows, you can, and a processor will do what you say, the CPU will just use 2 blocks of 64 bit values for it to store the 128 bit value. And that is the slowdown where if you would use a real 128 bit processor. Because a CPU has to do more work to store and work with these numbers.
Its the same with a 32 bit processor that want to work with 64 bit numbers, it can, otherwise Windows File Manager with Windows XP would never been able to show you files larger as 4 GB, but it can, its a trick of the CPU and OS simple put, but again, this is really slower as using a real 64 bit processor (and even this depends, because if a software application only has to do very little work with 64 bit values, but 99% of the application is using 32 bit values, the user will not notice it, but if 99% of a software package (like prolly Nasa software) needs to work with minimal 64 bit values where the application is constantly working with the numbers, you better dont come up with a 32 bit computer if you want to have a reasonable speed).
The downside of 128 bit or higher processors is that they need more cache space and stuff to store the values (price).
a 64 bit computer as far as i recall will always store the values in a 64 bit format at the CPU level, and not in a 32 bit format even if the software application defined a value to be 32 bit.
So if you store a 64 bit (8 bytes) value onto a 128 bit processor the processor will take 16 bytes for it to store it if i'm correct
Thats a lot of overhead and a lot of extra 0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0 even if 99,9% of applications never even working with 128 bit values.
So what im trying to say is that you must take storage vs speed into consideration too why we still working with 64 bit computers.
128 needs double the storage of 64 bit to store the bytes.
So yes the jump from 32 to 64 was a good one and necessary (4 GB was to small, even our videos are bigger now)
but the one from 64 to 128 has to many side effects in my eyes, and not only at the CPU level, but also at the Windows Registry for example, if they adding 128 bit values to it, the Windows Registry will grow a lot bigger if Windows upgrading all the 64 bit values to 128. And for what?, for values nobody even gonna use in this lifetime.
So now you know if you read about '256 bits (or more) encryption!", its just 32 bytes of data which can be anything. 32 bytes is just you open up notepad.exe and you type 32 random characters, that is your own created 256 bit encryption key, and now you only have to validate this to some server you wrote, and then you say can ''look, i wrote my first 256 bits encryption'' (joking a little, you understand)
For encryptions afcourse 128 bit or more processors will be much better and faster, but to upgrade all our computers for that alone to have a little more speed increasement when we sign in at a website or software package?
And this can also be applied to your Nintendo, Sega, Neo Geo devices, if its CPU cannot hold 8 bit or 16 bit or 32 bit values depending on the device they should not have been called it and we would have had a lot of lawsuits back then,
but this is how bits and bytes work. I dont think even Nintendo would deviate from something so fixed written in stone if you talk about a ''CPU''. But you can have a processor that can hold those 16 bits values, but it doesnt mean it makes it a quick device at the same time if all surrounded it is fixed with tape and staples if you get my drift.
Look at the Neo Geo saying ''were 24 bits'', and how quickly people found out back then that this was a marketing lie, and using a co-processor that was 8 bits, so they just did 16 bit (main cpu) + 8 bit (co cpu) = 24 bits.
But it was well known to people that this was a trick, and that is why a few years later they wend bankrupt. The customers had the last word into the ''24 bit'' lie. And we never heard anything about 24 bit processors after that ever again.
I'm pretty sure that SNK went bankrupt because they didn't manage to adapt to 3D graphics fast enough, it had nothing to do with people being up in arms against the "24 bit" claims. In fact, most people didn't even know or cared about Neo Geo's number of bits.
@@rijjhb9467 okok, i admit that was a joke, althought it came close to reality. Because nobody with the right mind would build a actual working functional 24 bit CPU, and yes if you Google there as a few very unknown ones, (prolly they lying too and using some co processor).
Because if you already have a 8 bit CPU, its pretty easy to scale to 16 bit, you just have to double (x2) the block sizes.
But if you have a 8 bits computer, and then you gonna add lets say 4 bits to it. Then you simple cant look at all the source inside a processor and just double the sizes (x2 everything), because you would have to add 33% or something to it, but if you then want to divide it again you cant just easily do / 2 again because it comes back to some close value to what it was, but not exactly because its rounded
Look at 2+1 = 3 and then / 2 = 1.5.
And now consider 8 + 8 = 16 / 2 = 8.
Or 16 + 16 = 32 /2 = 16
Or 32 + 32 = 64 /2 = 32
And now consider the Neo Geo its fake bits: 16 + 8 = 24 / 2 = 12.
It would be unhuman to really add just 8 extra bits to a existing CPU model architecture (except the 8 bit cpu's itself back then afcourse).
I can think of a lot of reasons why Intel or AMD or Nintendo would never gonna make something like a 24 or 65 bit or 96 bits CPU, because it would take way to much work to upgrade a CPU and to check every calculation and block size its doing as if you just double the block/buffer sizes. That way you know you can easily add backwards compatibility too.
Remember that old Intel CPU has math problems also, and that kind of stuff. I dont think anyone will ever gonna take the risk anymore to advertise a computer as something that cant be divided back to exactly 8 bits by keep doing / 2. And you know why, because it takes exactly 8 bits to store 1 byte.
7:12, wow, what model/revision of Mega Drive is that? I only know of Model 1 VA0-VA6.8 with the DIP 68000, and Model 1 VA7 and Model 2s with the QFP 68000.
This is really informative. Rather than being either on the side of just using the bit terminology or being on the side of saying that that terminology is all useless, you give some info about some of the things that it can refer to, and how these designations can be shorthand for the generations but most system architecture did not strictly fit into those definitions. Thanks!
What if in an alternate timeline, video games first came out in 1980? With 8-Bit as the 1st Gen. And every console Gen was 5-years long? Like 16-Bits in 1985, 32-Bits in 1990, and 64-Bits in 64-Bit in 1995, 128-Bit in 2000, and 256-Bit in 2005? And if game companies retired from consoles in 2010 in favor of mobile devices?
Came in confused. Left slightly less confused...
The 386sx CPU used in low cost PC's at the time was a 32bit CPU with a 16 bit bus. Effectively a souped up 286
It was more than a souped up 286 haha. 386 is more than just a wide address bus.
The SNES' Ricoh 65C816 clone CPU is 8bit in the same way the Intel 8088 is 8bit, which is to say it isn't but with the caveat of being bottlenecked by the bus when performing 16bit operations. If it crunches 16bit numbers natively without having to write an emulator in software, it's a 16bit CPU, even if it has to spit out only half of that 16 bit value at a time.
^This. I mean the developer doesn't even know the data bus requires two fetches for 16bit data. As in, they're not even aware or have to do anything special - just load register, 16bit value.
Great informative video. Really made it clear to me how CPUs actually work in terms of bits :D
Glad to hear!
Another great video on the bit wars of the 90s
This is the best explanation on the subject I've ever seen
"Bits" is generally just a marketing term. CPUs do fall into groups, but tend to share more in common with others by the same people or with related architectures than they do with others with the same number of bits. The NES and SNES, while one is "8/[21?/16]/8-bit" and the other "16/24/8-bit," are actually very closely related. Meanwhile the original Gameboy's CPU, an old "8/[25?/16]/8-bit" one is technically a very distant cousin to the "64/[39/48]/256-bit" beast that I play most games with nowadays.
The question marks are because I wanted to include both the virtual and physical address busses of the x86_64 processor, which made me remember how mappers work rather similar to paging and so could be argued to act like an extended physical address bus, even if they're not within the CPUs themselves.
"Bit Wars, 64 bits, 32 bits, 16 bits, 8 bits, 4 bits, 2 bits, 1 bit, half bit, quarter bit, the WRIST GAME!" - AVGN
The N64 is 100% driven by a 64-bit CPU. The software, on the other hand, was almost entirely written in 32-bit. Still, it was able to make games like Super Mario 64 and Zelda that the PS1 couldn't touch.
🤷♂️ Metal Gear. Just sayin.
@@vladv5126 I think there's nothing, graphically, in Metal Gear Solid that couldn't be done on the Nintendo 64.
Spyro was similar to the collectathon 3D platformers the litter the N64 like Banjo and DK64.
For balanced debate, Gran Turismo is a perfect example of the PS1 doing things the N64 could only dream of.
@@elnoel1220 and then....there is World Driver Championship doing things the Ps1 could only dream of.😉
I enjoyed the video but was surprised that you didn't mention the Atari ST which, if memory serves, is so named because it has a 16/32 (ST) bit 68000 processor.
Thank you for mentioning Intellivision! It’s almost always the forgotten 16-bit console.
@6:00 yes, it does. Unless you're doing bank switching on the memory side. The cpu literally has no way to know about any other memory unless it had a larger internal memory space, even if bank switching on the memory side you're just overwriting part of the existing 16bit space and you can't even overwrite all of it because you would crash and bank switching on the memory side means some sort of processor on the memory side that knows when to switch banks which is how it works in gaming carts generally when the game needs storage beyond available in the cpus address space or available address lines.
and modern cpus actually only have like 48 bit for memory even if the virtual address space for everything is 64bit.
Pretty sure most single core processors up to a certain point would all be classed as 32 bit at maximum anyway and probably the first console to use a 64 bit ones was the Xbox 360. Which is probably why it was dropped in marketing when things like the dreamcast came out.
N64 and PS2 had CPUs with 64bit MIPS architectures (as in 64-bit general purpose integer registers, 64-bit integer arithmetic at the same speed as 32-bit, etc) but in practice that made little or no practical difference vs the 32-bit ISAs in GameCube and Dreamcast.
If we follow the old marketing rules, the PS3/360 generation should have been 256 bit, the PS4 512bit and the current one 1024bit.
Excellent overview, thank you for your work!
Much appreciated!
So many Computers and game consoles had so many variables and differences between the 80's up until now. You can have a 32 bit or 64 bit processor- but if the clock speed is slow, memory is shared, databus is limited, bus speed is slow- that wouldn't matter. I've had 486's with more memory, higher clock speed shorter databus and on a better board that would beat a Pentium chip at certain tasks like playing doom or duke nukem. Data rate, speed, interrupts, memory, storage, input and output matter.
Even though I have a pretty well-rounded understanding of computer hardware I learned a lot from this video. I've always defined a system's class based on the size of it's Data Bus and just looking at the specs of the 65C816 it's really not all that different from the Z80 or 6509 except it's Address Bus is accessible via 24-Bits instead of 16. So knowing this now confirms something I heard the other day in that the SNES' design began back in early 1987 and was slated for release in 1989 but got delayed by 1 year due to chip shortages in 1988. So really by the time we got Super Nintendo in 1991, what we perceived as cutting edge technology at the time was almost outdated. Also makes sense why Nintendo teamed up with Argonaut to conceive of the Super FX chip to persue 3D Graphics. It's interesting how Co-Processors extended the life of the SNES just like how MMC's extended the life of the NES.
Is a 386sx a 16 bit CPU or a 32 bit CPU?
From a hypothetical hardware perspective though. If an instruction takes 7 cycles to execute on a 16 bit register, would using 1 cycle to fetch the data over a 16 bit pipeline really make that much of a difference over using 2 cycles over an 8 bit pipeline? You're not doubling the performance, you're just reducing the total seek/execution time by 1 cycle. Sure that does make a difference, but is it enough of a difference to be worth the extra cost in complexity? That's a real engineering decision.
@@jd9119 The 386SX is indeed a 16-Bit CPU. Even though it's registers can do 32-Bit it's Data Bus is limited to 16 Bits. You could think of it more as Intel's equivalent to the Motorola 68000 (32 bit registers with 16-Bit data). As far as the trade off between pipelines and cycles that's beyond my scope but I'm super interested if someone out there wants to chime in on this thread. If it helps I do remember hearing a talk about Gauntlet's Arcade development from Ed Logg, one of Atari's leading programmers at the company. He criticized the 68K saying he didn't like how the CPU used so many cycles and that it was over hyped at the time, that some 8-Bit CPUs were just as good cause of better efficiency with less cycles.
@@thedrunkmonkshow internally it's nearly identical to the DX except for its data bus. The way it processess the data is 32 bit. It's databus causes a couple extra steps in the fetch/sending of data, but that doesn't equate to that much of an efficiency loss since it's only an extra couple cycle clicks.
The bus size is a poor metric.
deriving the "bitness" of a cpu from the size of the data bus is just as ridiculous as "adding up bits of multiple processors". It literally doesn't mean anything if the data bus was balzing fast 1bit serialization, 200bit with serious latency. What matters is the width of the register. Because THAT influences your work and how you write code, and in the end - your performance (relatively speaking). z80 and the 65x design are nothing alike, so the '816 is nothing alike to the z80. It's "alike" to the 65c02, except even more wider registers and more friendly instructions (stack relative ones that make higher level compiler optimization easier to deal with). These aren't PC processors.. these are embedded processors. That only exception to that is the 68k, which is a very "general" processor, even if it a bit overkill for a game system.
Ken vs. Earthquake!? WTF! (great video, as always)
Great video.
I'd like a documentary on why the PS2 seemed a rather lax system in the early days against the Dreamcast and how it ended up being the most amazing console and best selling console of all time. How did the PS2 go from a lame also ran console to something that suddenly brought us God of War 2, GTA V, MGS 2? When the PS2 came out I wasn't even that excited for it. It even got better games than the GC and Xbox for the most part, and then suddenly shrank to the slim profile. Running Burnout 2 or GOW2 on a console that is 1/8th the size of the Xbox is just amazing.
The PS5 is a 2048-bit console😅😅😅
Still remember when magazines hyped up the Dreamcast and PS2 as 128-bit systems. Those were the days!
Nintendo 64 is quite a fun beast in terms of "bits", it use 1,4,8,9,15,16,18,32,64 and 128bits in it's hardware, with 64bit being the less useful of em.
can't help but think of the AVGN bit (err) when he gets angry over bits (I think it was from the tiger electronics ep)
What's the name of the game at 24:41? I have been looking for that game for years. I thought I had imagined it.
Wouldn't the highest number just be the same as the busrate of the gpu therefor the bit it gamesystem stands for the gpu 's bandwidth ?
Excellent 'Jargon' busting,,,,you did!
My first computer was a Ti994a.. That was 16 bit.. With a huge frickin asterisk
15-bit address bus! 16-bit data bus! 16-bit internal registers! Even the RAM was broken up into natively 16-bit words! ....Aaaaand all of the memory except the first 128 words was slow as molasses to actually access because it was routed through the video chip for some dumb reason.
@@stevethepocket Plus the BASIC was wonky and the native memory was 16k, which crippled it against the C64. But I still have one and love the damn thing.
@@stevethepocket Parsec forever!
The whole video I thought someone was cracking granite with a pickaxe in the other room. Anyone else hear that in the left channel?
What's the space shooter at 24:55 called?
It's called Galactic Storm
21:50 It also had a special 32 bit CPU too.... but that's still 32 bit..... and I'm not entirely sure what the heck it was....
Whoops! This comment was an error, please ignore it. For some reason, I am unable to delete a comment. I've seen it be done, so I'm sort of stuck.
When it comes to retro style games I always felt being made now should be done as like it was being made on a 32 bit cartridge machine with some custom chips
If we had the storage density of modern flash devices when they were making 8 bit and 16 bit Nintendo games it would have been astonishing. The N64 might have not been such a joke either.
@@mrflamewars the N64 I know had some pain points for developers , and thinking back with hindsight if they made a few changes would have improved, and think the texture cache being so small was one of them
@@EastyyBlogspot The N64 games from Rareware were great and they really carried the system. Compare the gorgeous texture work in Banjo Kazooie to the fuggedy ugly Mario 64 textures.
@@mrflamewars the 64MB cart limit was actually not all that bad. You mostly missed out on a cd soundtrack. But the sampled sound chip was ok.
It was that texture cache that was just too small.
@@mrflamewars Alot of Super Mario 64's textures were also taken from royalty-free libraries online, not made in-house.
Which probably has a big effect on the quality as well.
13:00 very brave to let that soundtrack play even in the background. CH is notorious for copyright on his Turrican stuff.
I tried fixing my C64, now it's 100 bits....in a box....in the loft.
Thank you for explaining so well how all the console war arm chair commentators and pundits trying to take a shot at the PC Engine are just talking nonsense.
PC Engine was very good, and unlike the Sega CD, the PC Engine CD was successful, and a lot of the best games were released for it. The PCE had a faster CPU than the SNES, and could display more on-screen colors than the Genesis. With the Super CD RAM expansion, the PCE had more RAM than either the SNES or Genesis, while having superior data storage via the CD medium. It was an amazing system for its time. Just a shame it didn't do well in America.
There's a retro gaming festival in the US called '64bits or less' :)
Well, the z80 has a 4bit ALU. And no one calls it a 4bit processor. Like wise, the 68k has FULL 32bit support.. registers, operations, etc. FULL. And yet no one refers to it as a 32bit processor (for which is really is).
19:17 $uperChase HQ
One thing that you can to this day tell by the BIT number is graphics cards(kindof). They usually have the BIT number listed in the speck sheet but its about memory bus width. How many bits can the GPU pull from the graphics ram in one clock cycle. The higher the number for a specific type of ram the faster the GPU can use the ram. It depends on the ram though. A 512bit gddr3 memory graphics card like a 260 is waaaaay slower then a 384bit GDDR6x card like a 3080. But if you compare 2 GDDR6 cards with 256 or 384(most top tier cards), the higher one will do better even if the other specs are similar. AMD and Nvidia can tweak these numbers along with the shader core count and ram type, to dial in the exact performance for price. These company's have shipped cards with gimped ram bitrates and sold crap preforming cards.
TLDR; If your looking at two used 3060s and one has a higher bit memory, pick that one.
One has 8GB and the other 12GB, so you can arrive to the same conclusion without even looking at bits.
@@rijjhb9467 With that example 3060 yeah. But they have had cards in the past that used different ram configurations for the same card. If they use 1gb chips and fill all the ram sockets you get the full bit width. But if they switch to half the number of 2gb chips, you get half the lanes(or bits). I dont think they do that anymore. So your probably right these days.
A fantastic and level headed look at bitology, so to speak, bravo!
Back when the Gamecube came out, it was common playground knowledge that it was a 128-bit system.
It had to be. Anything else was going, backwards, right?
The Intellivision is my favourite 16 bit machine ^_^
11:15 what's the name of the game, please? I'm sure I played this as a wee boy. Thanks
It's Swashbuckler on the Apple II
@@Sharopolis thanks! And thanks for your channel. Recent subscriber and really impressed!
Me in the early 90's school playground -'hey you 8 bit peasants,I've got an Amiga.who wants to come to my house and play shadow of the beast on my 16 bit monster and have your minds blown?'
Jagu-aaarrrr.
Good video.
I miss the old days where we used to play games on one bit computers. There was only one button and the interactions were in person. Now kids these days break windows and eat their neighbors pets with their pocket calculators. Too many damn bits, I say. I'd say the everything went to the devil when those little boxes started capturing souls and we knew it because anyone in them had the color drained from them. Now we have singing porcupines and angry birds that coax you into giving your banking information and reward you with tokens you can't even buy a dodo feather to wipe your ass with. Now plumbers are the rage but don't even honor a pinky swear cus they got three fingers and a thumb that they hide in gloves they stole from Mickey's hole. Times were simpler when you just did your business out the window and you didn't have to concern yourself with a couple plumbers burstin through your toilet to steal gloves, coins and fungi after they stomp on your pets and kidnap your daughter. Despite what the video games say, you got but one heart and there ain't enough bloodletting a man can do to get it back to normal after so much abuse. That's just my two bits on the consequential relationship society has with video games and the events they captured and distributed to youngsters like the baby boomers and beyond. After Charlie Chaplin had his soul stolen he can be quoted saying
Commodore 64 was the first 64 Bit computer. That's a fact.
😂👍
no, it's a 64 kilobyte computer, which is 8192 times better. that means the C64 is the most powerful home computer ever created.
Very true. Although it's a bit strange that it came out five years after Atari released the first 2,600 bit video game console.
@@gwishart It was a time of ups and downs.
😂
Does that mean that 16-bit console can easy play games from 8-bit console?
My colloquial memory of this era regarding bits was that by the mid-late 90s, the Playstation which hadn't touted 32 or 64 bits or whatever, it just didn't matter anymore. And I think it was that the supposed 32-bit era was so underwhelming, the games weren't memorable.
PS1 definitely was touted as a 32bit machine. The 32/64bit era was a big deal at the time as it was the first generation to focus on 3D games over 2D games, and while a lot of those games didn't age as well as 2D games from the 16-bit era, it was a big deal at the time, and there still were quite a few amazing games. Mario 64, Zelda OOT, Metal Gear Solid 1 are all still amazing games from that time period among many others.
@@thuggeegaming659 it really didn't come up with anyone in my circles. It being 32-bit wasn't the big deal, that it ran off CDs was.
@@anthonybird546 Of course it came up in your circles. No, there were plenty of CD based systems before the 32-bit era, the Sega CD, the Turbo-Grafix 16 CD, and PCs had CD-Roms for plenty of years before consoles. Plus the N64 didn't even use CDs. What made the consoles special was the combination of the CD based format and the improvement in graphics to display 3D graphics.
@@thuggeegaming659 yeah no shit, I was there. It was more important to us that CD technology was being used, not bits. I already enjoyed the TG-CD, and even as a tween I could see the potential, it was confounding to all of us that Nintendo went to cartridges, at the time. It seemed counter to the way things were going.
@@anthonybird546 No, I didn't say bits was more important to you, I'm saying that the fact that 32bit systems could run 3D games is more important than the CD medium alone, which was nothing new. You didn't even have a Turbografix CD 😂
Was the 8-bit question about the 16-bit console bait? 'Cause I totally fell for it.
Err: Ok, yes, you did mention that. My bad!
remember 2D vs 3D graphics are totally different not to long ago Nvidia launched a the Gt1030 of which there are 2 versions a DDR4 and a GDDR5 both with the same amount of memory 2GB and the same Processing unit... but one is vastly superior by having a 64 bit x2 memory bus.. it has 3 times the memory bandwidth and twice the performance but they both 64bit or are they?
0:01 THE WRIST GAME, QUARTER BIT, HALF BIT, 1 BIT, 2 bits, 4 bits, 8 bits, 16 bits, 32 bits, 64 bits
prolly better to call things by generation like 4th gen and 5th gen
In conclusion: it's complicated.
The "bit" thing really was only relevant during the NES/Genesis days (debatably the PS1/Saturn era). While it made sense to categorize hardware by bits back then, it has absolutely no relevance today as the data Bus on the CPU either doesn't even exist or isn't as important as other stuff. It was just a method to categorize a video game generation that really only took into account two generations of hardware, but incorrectly assumed how generations of hardware would improve in the future. The all mighty 128 bit emotion engine (it probably wasn't 128 bit anyway) in the PS2 sounded super powerful, but the Xbox with its puny 32bit processor was easily much more powerful.
It wasn't the CPU that made the Xbox much more powerful than the PS2. It was the GPU. The Emotion Engine CPU in the PS2 ran circles around the Pentium 3 CPU in the Xbox but games are meant to push graphics not to do maths.
The GPU in the Xbox was 2 generations ahead of the GPU in the PS2. The NV2A GPU in the Xbox was the first home console with programmable shaders and T&L hardware that did much of the graphical calculations. The Graphics Synthesizer GPU in the PS2 was a basic rasterizer that was meant to push polygons and pixels at a high rate but relied on the Emotion Engine to do the 3D calculations.
Hell the PS4 and Xbox One CPUs are weaker than the Cell CPU used in the PS3. But they have much more powerful GPUs than the PS3. And that's what matters most for graphics.
@@BurritoKingdom Not for frame rate though. In fact the 360 and PS4 era were the worst in that regard. The PS2 could push most of its big hitters to 60fps. Metal Gear Solid 2 was incredibly looking for its time, yet it ran at 60fps, while MGS3 had to be downgraded to 30fps.
@@BurritoKingdom You misread what I said, I didn't say the CPU made the Xbox more powerful.
@@rijjhb9467 that was due to the PS3 having a much more inferior GPU, the 360 GPU, which came out a year earlier was much more advanced than the GPU in the PS3.
CPUs are mainly now used to calculate physics and AI in modern gaming and on the PS4/Xbone sound and decompression of textures. It's why new gameplay features weren't invented during the PS4/Xbone era. Assassin's Creed had to be downgraded because the CPUs in the PS4/Xbone couldn't handle the large amount of AI characters at the same time. That's why Assassin's Creed went to more open world environments rather than dense urban landscapes where you have to hide from mass AI back during the PS360 games. Systemic games went to the wayside during the PS4/XBone era, instead it was more open worlds, which matches the power of the GPUs since they were really good at creating large static environments. That's why destructible environments disappeared, because the weak CPUs in the PS4/Xbone couldnt do the physics calculations.
Never realized the NES and SNES both used 6502 designs. Funny how Nintendo considered one 8 and the other 16bit 😅
The SNES uses the WDC 65C816, which is a 16 bit version of the 6502. It's not the same as the 6502 but it is backwards compatible with it. The SNES was originally supposed to be backwards compatible with the NES but it was dropped during development. The biggest issue the SNES CPU wasn't that it was an upgraded version of the 6502 but because it ran so slow.
The Turbo Grafx uses the WDC 65C02, which is just an upgraded 6502 and even less advanced than the 68C816 used in the SNES. But it runs at a higher clocks speed than the SNES so games had fewer instances of slow down.
The 65C816 if ran at the same speed of the 65C02 or the 68000, would easily beat them but for some reason Nintendo chose a slow speed of only 3.58Mhz. That's why when games are patched to run on the SA-1 (basically the SNES CPU overclocked by 3 times) all slow down disappears.
I thought the Nintendo 64 must have 64MB of ram when I was a kid.
They all lied to me, I feel betrayed. 😥
THE WRIST GAMES!
So is the genesis more powerful than the snes or is it the programmer's in the software
Genesis had a more powerful CPU, and displayed games at a higher resolution. SNES could produce more on-screen colors and had hardware support for advanced sprite effects, i.e. scaling and rotation. Most multiplatform games looked better on the Genesis IMO, SNES games were stretched out when displayed at 4:3 aspect ratio.
Oh God, the comment section is going to be fun. Personally I go with the most restricted main bus like memory. But I can see why some people go with the fastest internal cpu bus.
Going by databus means that 8088 is an 8-bit CPU and 8086 is a 16-bit CPU, when the only thing they differ in practice is that 8086 is a bit faster at the same clock frequency.
What does that make Minecraft 8-bit³?
32 bits isn't really a category is because the number of CPU bits stopped being a limit, same with GPUs. However everyone has become Bit-brained, and we've grown to care too much about marketing buzz
Doesn't matter how many bits you console had, as long as it had Blast Processing. ;-)
it means nothing now since every thing is 64 bits now but still gets more powerful.
This whole comment is 504-bit. It's more powerful than my PS2!
Well if games are programmed to use the AVX512 vector extensions you can call it a 512 bit game.
Isn't the Intellivision 16-bit despite the system being absolutely primitive? There is an Intellivision emulator for the NES. How does that even work out?
Intellivision uses the CP1600 CPU, which has 16-bit registers and buses, all of them. However, it has a really simple instruction set, more reminiscent of even older (like, early 70s) 16-bit CPUs and contemporary 8-bit CPUs, rather than later much more complicated 16-bit CPUs.
Betcha the "emulator" just has an actual CP1600 inside the cartridge.
@vytah It's also just a plain slow CPU that's further hampered being shoehorned into a system architecture it was poorly designed for.
Its design is coincidentally a lot like the TI99/4 which came out around the same time. Other than the computer stuff anyway.
The term bits in game consoles is really just shorthand for generation. "Bits" as used by lay people just doesn't make any sense. Also, the "bits" doesn't double with the number of bits. Every bit doubles (9bit is double 8) . it doesn't help that all of the "8-bit" systems have 16 bit address buses.
Up until 64-bit… and then there was a really long gap with no formal naming system until people started talking about “Gen-n” machines.
In the late 90s/early 2000s, for a short period of time, people started comparing consoles by the number of triangles they could render.
For a short few years, it was all about "tri/s" and then this fad died out and people started caring more about resolution. Ironically, I think geometry was a very good metric for 3D games, for obvious reasons. Although it was often not very clear if we were talking about textured and lit polygons or not, so it still left the door open for misleading ads.