64 Bits: Nintendo's BIGGEST Mistake

Correction: Tharo pointed out that the float registers are actually 64 bits in width! Though it seems like compilers at the time would always end up using them as 2 seperate 32 bit registers that combine them to a 64 bit register as described. This seems to be the same compiler shortcoming that I've described for the general purpose registers. Also a bunch of people pointed out that "64 bit" may refer to memory bus bandwidth. Well.... the RAMBUS on the N64 is 9bit. There is a 72 bit bus in there somewhere too which kind of looks like a 64 bit bus, so maybe that's what the "64" in "Nintendo 64" could have stood for,...

Fun fact Nintendo wouldn't make another 64bit console until the Switch, 20 years after the release of the N64. GameCube, Wii, and Wii U all used similar 32bit CPUs.

64 was pure marketing. We used the 64 bit R4300 because SGI owned MIPS and the recently developed R4300 CPU was available and had the power/performance/cost tradeoffs we needed. If there had been an equally performant 32 bit processor we could have use it, and as Kraze points out it would have worked just as well. A bigger consideration than the register size was the size of the bus, which dictates how much memory can be read or written to DRAM in one cycle. Memory bandwidth was the real bottleneck in the N64 (and is usually the bottleneck in a graphics system, even with modern GPUs). The R4200 has a 64 bit bus, but the R4300 in the N64 actually has a 32 bit bus. In contrast the RDP (N64's pixel processor) used a 1024 bit bus and 1024 bit vector registers. I always thought Nintendo should have called it the N1024. But in fact all the busses (the 32 bit CPU bus, the 1024 bit RDP pixel bus, the 16 bit audio) all funneled (via the memory controller in the MCP) through the Rambus high speed 8 (or 9*) bit bus to the RDRAM memory. * Fun fact: the N64 actually used the parity bit as a data bit. So the Rambus was actually a 9bit bus. The 9th bit was not used by the cpu, but the framebuffer was 18 bits (9+9) in R5 G5 B5 C3 format where the 3 C=Coverage bits helped with antialiasing. The z buffer was also 18 bits.

So what I understand is that Kaze is creating the first Nintendo 32 game because it saves him frames.

Because higher bit means more better

for anyone wondering, Atari Jaguar which came out 3 years prior to N64, marketed as 64-bit, had only a 64-bit object processor and blitter logic block, but the main CPU was 32-bit. a hard stretch to call 64-bit outside of marketing.

Another thing to consider: Nintendo worked closely with sgi, who were a Big Deal in 3D modeling and animation. sgi machines were powerful workstations utilizing the 64 bit version of the MIPS architechture, and were the workstations of choice for Nintendo of that era. Familiarity with the architecture would have been a huge reason for choosing MIPS 64 over other, more purpose-efficient designs. It's also easier to run dev builds on machines that share the same architecture. In addition, it is usually cheaper to tweak an existing design than create a new one with new features (like 16-bit arithmetic acceleration).

Funny to think that after N64, all Nintendo consoles until the Switch were 32 bit.

Kaze: The N64 was the first 64 bit console. Atari Jaguar: Am I a joke to you? Literally everyone: Yes.

It wasnt done purely for marketing. SGi were world leaders in graphics and their big expensive workstations were 64bit. It made sense to cut that down to fit than to from scratch build a new cpu with custom instructions. That basically never happens. Nes and Snes had a cpu based on the popular 6502. There weren’t many choices in 1996. The 68k family of chip were aging and expensive. PowerPC really was just getting off the ground.

When I was a kid, I thought the GameCube had a 128-bit system and the Wii a 256 one because they should double every gen

For what it’s worth, most modern sound is still 16-bit 44.1kHz or 16-bit 48kHz. I say this having developed an audio player for a final project in uni.

Wait till you look at the Dreamcast and PlayStation 2 where both were advertised as being 128 bits.

The hype was real - and went hand in hand with the first iteration of VR that wasn't consumer ready. Flat shaded real time polygons on a $250 home console was a BFD. Pilotwings 64 and Aerofighters Assault were developed by pioneers in VR simulation

It is kind of like car companies advertising the number of cylinders in an engine. It really doesn't tell you how the performance of the car is, but more cylinders sounds better.

1:33 Note here that when we're talking about videos, 8 bits means 8 bits per color channel, so 24 bits in total. The alternative is 10 bits per channel, totalling 30 bits. For most use cases, 24 bits is perfectly fine.

So "64 Bits" was more or less Nintendo's own variant of "Blast Processing".

Think 64 was simply a marketing term because at this time, I remember it well despite being so young, there was such a huge rapid growth in computers and tech, calling it a “64 bit console” despite anyone knowing what that meant, helped it ride a wave of tech obsession that pretty much captivated everyone. My dad was into building pcs at the time. So much that all his coworkers asked him to set them up with one, and I remember every year ram, disk space, all forms of memory were doubling. what you bought high end one year, was low end the next, cpus were getting faster and faster and the gpu race was just beginning. I remember the first nvidia gpus being released. I believe previously, the only thing that revolutionary was the 3dfx voodoo card. It was an amazing time for tech and video games and I think people who otherwise wouldn’t have cared at all about tech were learning terms like “64bit” it was really fascinating. He still has a cupboard full of dos floppy disks and old ms software. It was a really nostalgic wave of tech excitement that I don’t think will ever happen again. It was magical. I don’t feel that same magic when I look at today’s tech.

1. Coming from Saturn, having a 64-bit (really, 48 bit) register is extremely useful by itself. 2. What would have mattered more is the pulse width of the RAM bus, which other comments indicate the N64's bus was 9 bit. Hilarious; the Saturn had 32 and 16 bit busses. 3. Another thing which would have made a difference is the width of the instructions; the N64's instructions are 32-bits long. Imagine how much faster it could've been if the instructions were 16-bits long. (There are compromises to be made in doing so, but it definitely worked out for SuperH) 3. The reason Nintendo ended up with a 64-bit processor was almost certainly SGI who just kind of had it on-hand.

Reminds me of that story where a chain of burger restaurants was marketing a third-of-a-pound burger (1/3) to combat McDonald's quarter-pound burger (1/4). It didn't catch on, because people thought the quarter pound burger was larger than the third-of-a-pound burger. As everyone knows 1/3 < 1/4. Never underestimate the stupidity of people.