Is the -bit argument defunct now?

[supercat]

At a whopping 984 kilohertz, the Intellivision had significantly less horsepower. It was able to compete because of good graphics hardware. It did have more "bits", though.

 

The clock speed of the Atari 2600 is 1.19MHz, which is to say about 21% faster than 984kHz. Without knowing the number of clocks per instruction, it's impossible to judge what the 984kHz really means.

 

Many 8051-family microprocessors are often run with a crystal clock of 11.0592MHz which is divided by 12 to yield a system clock of 921.6kHz. When not accessing external memory, those processors can spin circles around a 6502 running at 1.19MHz, since most instructions only take one cycle, and most of the rest take two (only DIV and MUL take four). The 6502 can come out a little bit ahead on code that makes lots of indirect indexed accesses, but the 8x51 makes that up pretty quickly on other instructions. For example, the equivalent of "lda (ptr),y" (5 cycles) would be "mov DPL,ptr / mov DPH,ptr+1 / movc a,@a+dptr" which would take 6 cycles. On the other hand, storing that value to an I/O register would take 3 cycles on the 6502 and 1 on the 8051, yielding total times of 8 cycles vs 7.

[JB]

person 1: "Shuffle is innovative!" (shoutout to my man JB)

Yo!

 

 

Bingo. I find it especially funny when people claim that the Atari 2600 is "4-bit" due to the fact that it's obviously nowhere near as good as a NES. Trying to explain the logistics of a 4-bit processor to people is exhausting.

I got in an argument with someone once about whether the 2600 was a "1-bit" system or not.

Apparently "You CAN'T have a 1-bit processor, moron!" isn't a valid counterargument.

 

 

I stand by the rest, with the exception that the public intel on the Broadway chip (Wii) may be incorrect. It's understood to be a G3-based processor, but perhaps you know better CPUWiz?

 

It is also a 64bit processor.

Wasn't the Gamecube processor the FIRST 64-bit PowerPC chip?

[supercat]

Bingo. I find it especially funny when people claim that the Atari 2600 is "4-bit" due to the fact that it's obviously nowhere near as good as a NES. Trying to explain the logistics of a 4-bit processor to people is exhausting

 

There are 4-bit processors. Not sure why, given that most of the chip area of a typical micro is going to be the code storage, but even today companies still make 4-bit micros for low-cost high-volume applications.

 

Actually, I'd be curious to see specs on the original 4004. I know Intel's first microprocessor was a 4-bit machine, but I'm not quite sure what one would do with such a beast. I think it was supposed to take the place of hardwired circuitry for a calculator, but unless it provided a reasonably-convenient way to access more than 16 nybbles of RAM I would think even implementing a basic four-banger calculator would be tough.

[+batari]

Bingo. I find it especially funny when people claim that the Atari 2600 is "4-bit" due to the fact that it's obviously nowhere near as good as a NES. Trying to explain the logistics of a 4-bit processor to people is exhausting

 

There are 4-bit processors. Not sure why, given that most of the chip area of a typical micro is going to be the code storage, but even today companies still make 4-bit micros for low-cost high-volume applications.

 

Actually, I'd be curious to see specs on the original 4004. I know Intel's first microprocessor was a 4-bit machine, but I'm not quite sure what one would do with such a beast. I think it was supposed to take the place of hardwired circuitry for a calculator, but unless it provided a reasonably-convenient way to access more than 16 nybbles of RAM I would think even implementing a basic four-banger calculator would be tough.

http://download.intel.com/museum/archives/...4_datasheet.pdf

[supercat]

http://download.intel.com/museum/archives/...4_datasheet.pdf

 

Well, I guess it makes sense that they'd use 8-bit opcodes, though having to do two code fetches for every instruction cycle would seem an obvious inefficiency. I don't really understand from that data sheet how RAM access was supposed to work, and I don't see any sort of indexing method. It's interesting to see that they included a looping instruction, though.

[+batari]

http://download.intel.com/museum/archives/...4_datasheet.pdf

 

Well, I guess it makes sense that they'd use 8-bit opcodes, though having to do two code fetches for every instruction cycle would seem an obvious inefficiency. I don't really understand from that data sheet how RAM access was supposed to work, and I don't see any sort of indexing method. It's interesting to see that they included a looping instruction, though.

I'd guess that support logic was needed for the RAM. But I see something interesting about the 4004 - it uses bankswitching...?

[CPUWIZ]

Wasn't the Gamecube processor the FIRST 64-bit PowerPC chip?

 

I think Apple used it first, but I could be wrong.

[supercat]

But I see something interesting about the 4004 - it uses bankswitching...?

 

Not quite, from what I understand. Basically, imagine the 6502 with the following changes:

 

-1- The branch instructions simply copy the next byte of operand into the low byte of the program counter and are thus limited to branching within the page containing the next instruction (usually the same page as the branch instruction unless it starts on the last byte of a page)

 

-2- The only addressing modes are absolute, zero page, and non-indexed indirect.

 

The subdivision of both code and data into pages would be quite noticeable and cumbersome, but I wouldn't exactly call it "bank switching".

[kevincal]

NEC - TurboGrafx 16 - It is on every game box.

Fair enough. It still doesn't make the Jag a 64 bit machine, but at least it (somewhat) excuses their advertising.

 

As I said, though: It's all about the games. The Jag didn't win or lose because of its hardware, it lost because of its games. (Or lack thereof.) The silver lining is that we can now go back to these systems for dirt-cheap prices and evaluate their merits in a market vacuum. Which means that fun can be found even in games that never would have sold a system.

 

So did you even own a Jag ever? If so, which games did you have? The system really does have some great games regardless of what the extremely biased media has said over the years. I also think it was dumb of Atari to stress the 64-bit thing, regardless if it was or not. They should have just called it 32-bit in the first place so everyone didn't have expectations of it becoming the #1 system.

[kevincal]

Oh, and btw I actually miss the bit wars...Those were fun times. The consoles wars seem boring to me now.

[jbanes]

Wasn't the Gamecube processor the FIRST 64-bit PowerPC chip?

I think Apple used it first, but I could be wrong.

Apple was indeed the first user of 64 bit PowerPC chips with the introduction of the PowerPC G5. The Gekko was a 32-bit core based on the G3 PowerPC 750.

Edited January 25, 2007 by jbanes

[jbanes]

At a whopping 984 kilohertz, the Intellivision had significantly less horsepower. It was able to compete because of good graphics hardware. It did have more "bits", though.

The clock speed of the Atari 2600 is 1.19MHz, which is to say about 21% faster than 984kHz. Without knowing the number of clocks per instruction, it's impossible to judge what the 984kHz really means.

The comparison was to the higher-clocked 5200 and Colecovision, not the 2600.

 

 

I got in an argument with someone once about whether the 2600 was a "1-bit" system or not.

Apparently "You CAN'T have a 1-bit processor, moron!" isn't a valid counterargument.

It is possible to have a 1-bit processor, though it wouldn't be particularly practical. Even a 32 bit CPU is more or less composed of 32 1-bit circuits running in parallel. What you would lose is complex logic like multipliers and dividers, which rely on the ability to route logic between nearby bits. They would have to be emulated in a software loop rather than directly coded into the CPU. It should also go without saying that the address space and instruction set would need to be a bit larger than 1-bit.

 

 

So did you even own a Jag ever?

Sadly, I don't own a Jag. It is a system I'd like to acquire at some point, but I haven't found a good deal yet. I'm terminally cheap, and most Jag bundles that aren't damaged or missing components are outside of what I'm looking to pay.

 

The system really does have some great games regardless of what the extremely biased media has said over the years.

I have no doubt about that. As I said, being able to look back at the system in a market vacuum is a wonderful thing. It allows us to appreciate the system for what it was, rather than through the lense of "which system is #1 in this generation?" Again, the Jag failed because its games weren't appealing enough to the market in comparison to the competition, not because it didn't have any. Had Atari developed its own Mario/Sonic/Crash/Bonk/Whatever-like franchise to drive the system, they might have had a chance. Especially if they had packed said franchise with the system rather than Cybermorph and Blue Lightning.

[jesusc]

 

 

So did you even own a Jag ever?

 

 

Why is this a prerequisite for having an opinion? What is this biased media jag fans and conservatives always cry about? For every EGM review you can point me to that undeservedly bashed a jag game, i can point you to a GameFan review that undeservedly praised one.

The system has a handful of decent games, and many mediocre games.

There's not really enough incentive to own one based on those facts.

To me it is worth having for Tempest 2000 and Tenpest 2000 alone, but that's just me.

[+LS650]

So did you even own a Jag ever?

Why is this a prerequisite for having an opinion?

[kevincal]

At a whopping 984 kilohertz, the Intellivision had significantly less horsepower. It was able to compete because of good graphics hardware. It did have more "bits", though.

The clock speed of the Atari 2600 is 1.19MHz, which is to say about 21% faster than 984kHz. Without knowing the number of clocks per instruction, it's impossible to judge what the 984kHz really means.

The comparison was to the higher-clocked 5200 and Colecovision, not the 2600.

 

 

I got in an argument with someone once about whether the 2600 was a "1-bit" system or not.

Apparently "You CAN'T have a 1-bit processor, moron!" isn't a valid counterargument.

It is possible to have a 1-bit processor, though it wouldn't be particularly practical. Even a 32 bit CPU is more or less composed of 32 1-bit circuits running in parallel. What you would lose is complex logic like multipliers and dividers, which rely on the ability to route logic between nearby bits. They would have to be emulated in a software loop rather than directly coded into the CPU. It should also go without saying that the address space and instruction set would need to be a bit larger than 1-bit.

 

 

So did you even own a Jag ever?

Sadly, I don't own a Jag. It is a system I'd like to acquire at some point, but I haven't found a good deal yet. I'm terminally cheap, and most Jag bundles that aren't damaged or missing components are outside of what I'm looking to pay.

 

The system really does have some great games regardless of what the extremely biased media has said over the years.

I have no doubt about that. As I said, being able to look back at the system in a market vacuum is a wonderful thing. It allows us to appreciate the system for what it was, rather than through the lense of "which system is #1 in this generation?" Again, the Jag failed because its games weren't appealing enough to the market in comparison to the competition, not because it didn't have any. Had Atari developed its own Mario/Sonic/Crash/Bonk/Whatever-like franchise to drive the system, they might have had a chance. Especially if they had packed said franchise with the system rather than Cybermorph and Blue Lightning.

 

Well it just seemed you had a rather strong opinion about the Jag for someone whos never owned or maybe even played one. Well...As far as a mascot, Atari Did have Rayman...It was originally designed and created soley for the Jaguar until the word got out that it was an amazing game so of course Sony and Sega offered big bucks I'm sure to bring it to the PS and Saturn. Atari was also working on a game called "Indiana Jags." Cybermorph really isn't that bad a pack-in game. Of course they would have been much better off using a game like Doom or AvP (which they did infact pack-in in the Japanese Jag) And the Jag CD comes packed with the VLM...one of the best pack-ins ever imo!

[kevincal]

So did you even own a Jag ever?

Why is this a prerequisite for having an opinion?

 

[jbanes]

Well it just seemed you had a rather strong opinion about the Jag for someone whos never owned or maybe even played one.

1. I have played one.

 

2. I have a strong opinion about why it failed in the marketplace which is a very different opinion than one about the quality of the games.

 

Again, the Jag offered very little to convince player to purchase a Jag over one of the half a billion other options on the market. That's simply the way it was. Nintendo changed the market forever when they introduced franchise characters. You either got with the program, or you got out of the market.

 

Well...As far as a mascot, Atari Did have Rayman...It was originally designed and created soley for the Jaguar until the word got out that it was an amazing game so of course Sony and Sega offered big bucks I'm sure to bring it to the PS and Saturn.

Rayman could have been a good mascot. However, he belonged to Ubisoft, not Atari. If Atari was smart, they would have gotten their hooks into Ubisoft and ensured that Rayman was theirs. (Much like Sony did with Naughty Dog and Psygnosis.) Unfortunately, there was a very small window between when Rayman was released for the Jag and the Playstation/Saturn. (~2 months if wikipedia is to be believed.) Atari would have had to be more proactive if they wanted to make Rayman "their" mascot.

 

Cybermorph really isn't that bad a pack-in game.

Compared to Super Mario World and Sonic the Hedgehog, it's downright atrocious. Think about it from the perspective of a consumer in 1993. They could purchase an SNES for $199 or less and get Mario World for free, purchase a Genesis for a similar price and get Sonic, -OR- they could purchase a Jaguar for $250 and get Cybermorph.

 

For the majority of consumers, the choice was a bit of a no-brainer. Especially for the parent purchasing the consoles for their kids, who were more likely to warm up to the colorful cartoon characters than some dark-looking game with a bald, green lady as the only character.

 

Of course they would have been much better off using a game like Doom

Consumer response:

- "I can play that on my computer!"

- "Selling these violent games to our children is an atrocity! Atari is Hitler!"

- "I gave up Mario to get this?"

 

AvP

Consumer response:

- "I can play that on the SNES, and I can play Mario!" (Hey, no one said that consumers were always the smartest about these things.)

- "Selling these violent games to our children is an atrocity! Atari is Hitler!"

 

It's also worth noting that AvP as a pack-in cost Atari a pretty penny. The game was not an in-house title, but produced by Rebellion Software. Nintendo and Sega didn't have that problem because they had top-notch, in-house development. Sony somehow convinced the public that a pack-in was unnecessary, but they did have a lot more hype built up at launch. (Partly, there was no E3 to promote the Jaguar launch, and partly Sony had managed to build a fanbase in the Japanese market first.)

 

The Jag CD comes packed with the VLM...one of the best pack-ins ever imo!

That's... not a game.

[Ze_ro]

Congratulations on proving my point.

 

The 64 bit object, blitter, and memory controller chips do not a 64 bit system make. As I said, by that logic, my PC is a 256 bit monstrosity. (Some graphics cards even have 512 bit capabilties.) The CPU is the core of the system, and what is usually referred to for "bitness". It was 32 bit. You can try stretching it and say that the GPU was a general purpose core. It was 32 bit. The end result is, you can only get 64 bits if you "do the math" (32 + 32 = 64).

The problem is that there IS no definition for "bits" in the context of game systems. As mentioned, The TG-16 was advertised as 16-bits based on it's graphics chips. Same goes for the Lynx. And anyone who refers to the Dreamcast as "128-bit" is also referring to the graphics chips. In that respect, Atari was perfectly in the clear calling their system 64-bit.

 

Oh, and there actually IS a game system built on a 4-bit processor: The Microvision. Since it only has a screen resolution of 16x16, this actually works out quite well I'd imagine.

 

--Zero

[DracIsBack]

NEC - TurboGrafx 16 - It is on every game box.

Fair enough. It still doesn't make the Jag a 64 bit machine, but at least it (somewhat) excuses their advertising.

 

As I said, though: It's all about the games. The Jag didn't win or lose because of its hardware, it lost because of its games. (Or lack thereof.) The silver lining is that we can now go back to these systems for dirt-cheap prices and evaluate their merits in a market vacuum. Which means that fun can be found even in games that never would have sold a system.

 

 

Bitness was a pointless argument then (and now) because that was the first of systems that used a lot of different processors to get results as opposed to one primary processor.

[jbanes]

The problem is that there IS no definition for "bits" in the context of game systems.

There's not a clear definition in advertising. There *is* a clear definition (as clear as these things can get, anyway) in the technology industry. Atari could get away with advertising it as 64-bit, but that doesn't magically confer 64-bit performance advantages. Goatdan's point (the one I was responding to) was that the Jaguar was 64-bit, yet didn't show 4 times the performance. Yet that is easily falsifiable, as there were no General Purpose processors in the Jaguar that were 64 architectures.

 

Speaking of which, I've been researching the Emotion Engine. The "128-Bit RISC architecture" appears to be slightly exaggerated. The processor reads in 128 bit values into its 32 general purpose registers, but the actual ALU is 64 bits wide operating in 2-way superscalar mode. In effect, the processor is actually two 64-bit computational units operating in parallel.

 

In layman's terms: It's a 64-bit processor that does two numbers at once. This is similar to the Gekko design which makes use of two 32-bit ALUs to process more data in parallel. (Though the Gekko's 32 registers are 32 bits wide rather than 64 bits.) What's odd about Gekko, though, is that Nintendo actually had it modified to allow for two single-precision values (i.e. 32-bit numbers) to be processed by the FPU in parallel. It could still handle double precision (64-bit) floating point numbers, but it was explicitly optimized for 32-bit data.

 

This is in stark contrast to most desktop CPUs which actually upconvert single-precision floating point numbers before operating on them, then down-convert them to 32 bits before loading the result back into memory. That's why it only makes sense to perform 32-bit floating point ops if you've got limited memory to work with. Otherwise, you're needlessly making your program less efficient.

 

BTW, here's a fun FAQ on "bitness" that I ran into while researching the Emotion Engine. Nothing really new, but if you're not familiar with the topic it can be a fun read.

 

Last but not least, I'm not sure if I'm buying into the argument that Broadway is a 64-bit chip. Everything (and I do mean everything) points to it being based on the PowerPC 750CL series rather than the Power 970 architecture. What finally pushes me over the edge is the Broadway's physical characteristics. Its power consumption is a 20% less than Gekko (~5 watts) and the die size is a tiny 19 mm². The Power 970 series starts at 17 watts for their low-power G5 chips, and go up past 40 watts for the larger chips. The die sizes are also huge, well over 100mm² for 90nm chips.

 

There is no way that the Broadway is based on the Power 970 architecture. If IBM could have produced G5 chips with those specs, Apple never would have made the transition to Intel.

 

For the Coup'de'grace of the 64-bit theory, here is the spec sheet for the PowerPC 750CL. It states quite clearly:

 

The IBM PowerPC 750CL RISC Microprocessor is a 32-bit implementation of the IBM PowerPC family.

Of course, I don't have Nintendo's spec sheets in hand. Feel free to prove me wrong.

Edited January 25, 2007 by jbanes

[CPUWIZ]

Feel free to prove me wrong.

 

Here you go, info on the web about the Gekko, the GC CPU.

 

http://downloads.planetmirror.com/pub/sf/g...06ibm-gekko.pdf

 

Obviously I can't post stuff from the confidential docs, rest assured, I do have them in front of me and they are 64bit.

[jesusc]

So did you even own a Jag ever?

Why is this a prerequisite for having an opinion?

 

 

I've never driven a ferrari, yet i am of the opinion that it is fast.

I've never dropped acid, yet I'm of the opinion it messes up your perception.

I've never been in space, yet I'm of the opinion that it would be cool.

I've never been to Rome, yet I'm of the opinion that it would be historically interesting.

All that is true, but how can it be if I've never done any of those things?

[jbanes]

Here you go, info on the web about the Gekko, the GC CPU.

 

http://downloads.planetmirror.com/pub/sf/g...06ibm-gekko.pdf

That doc does not say what you think it says. I have to go now, but I'll address it more specifically when I get home.

[CPUWIZ]

That doc does not say what you think it says. I have to go now, but I'll address it more specifically when I get home.

 

You can't be serious. Do you know what a double precision floating point value is?

 

User A: "I have a green umbrella here at home."

User B: "No you don't, it's red."

User A: "What?"

User B: "I'll prove it to you later."

 

I know what you are gonna say next, the GC only has a 32bit address bus, so it's not a true 64bit machine. Fine, call it what you want. LOL

[kevincal]

1. I have played one.

 

2. I have a strong opinion about why it failed in the marketplace which is a very different opinion than one about the quality of the games.

 

Which games did you play?

 

Again, the Jag offered very little to convince player to purchase a Jag over one of the half a billion other options on the market. That's simply the way it was. Nintendo changed the market forever when they introduced franchise characters. You either got with the program, or you got out of the market.

 

I wouldn't call the first home-port (and a good one) of DOOM as well as AvP, Tempest 2000 and Iron Soldier "very little to convince a player." 3D games of this caliber were never seen on a home console, except for the Jag, at the time...With maybe the exception of a handfull of 3DO titles, again, at the time. (early to mid-1994)

 

Rayman could have been a good mascot. However, he belonged to Ubisoft, not Atari. If Atari was smart, they would have gotten their hooks into Ubisoft and ensured that Rayman was theirs. (Much like Sony did with Naughty Dog and Psygnosis.) Unfortunately, there was a very small window between when Rayman was released for the Jag and the Playstation/Saturn. (~2 months if wikipedia is to be believed.) Atari would have had to be more proactive if they wanted to make Rayman "their" mascot.

 

I have known he belonged to UBIsoft since 1994...k? Indeed Atari should have done just that.

 

Compared to Super Mario World and Sonic the Hedgehog, it's downright atrocious. Think about it from the perspective of a consumer in 1993. They could purchase an SNES for $199 or less and get Mario World for free, purchase a Genesis for a similar price and get Sonic, -OR- they could purchase a Jaguar for $250 and get Cybermorph.

 

It's nowhere near "downright atrocious" compared to those groundbreaking games...Everyone praised SNES StarFox right? Well in my and many others opinion, Cybermorph is a better game than that. Hey, it got stellar marks and game-of-the-month in Diehard GameFan, the greatest videogames magazine of all time...

 

For the majority of consumers, the choice was a bit of a no-brainer. Especially for the parent purchasing the consoles for their kids, who were more likely to warm up to the colorful cartoon characters than some dark-looking game with a bald, green lady as the only character.

 

True, but unfortunately 90% of videogame mags were obviously biased against the Jag back in the mid-90's...And most people didn't even have a computer at that time let alone the internet.

 

Consumer response:

- "I can play that on my computer!"

- "Selling these violent games to our children is an atrocity! Atari is Hitler!"

- "I gave up Mario to get this?"

 

Again, the majority of people back then didn't have a computer yet, thus many many console gamers had never played Doom. I didn't even know what Doom was all about until I played the Jag and 32X versions, although I had heard of Doom sometime before that. And Doom is just as fun and ground-breaking as any Mario game.

 

AvP

Consumer response:

- "I can play that on the SNES, and I can play Mario!" (Hey, no one said that consumers were always the smartest about these things.)

- "Selling these violent games to our children is an atrocity! Atari is Hitler!"

 

Anyone with the slightest interest in videogames knew the Jag version of AvP was totally different than the SNES AvP.

 

 

 

It's also worth noting that AvP as a pack-in cost Atari a pretty penny. The game was not an in-house title, but produced by Rebellion Software. Nintendo and Sega didn't have that problem because they had top-notch, in-house development. Sony somehow convinced the public that a pack-in was unnecessary, but they did have a lot more hype built up at launch. (Partly, there was no E3 to promote the Jaguar launch, and partly Sony had managed to build a fanbase in the Japanese market first.)

 

Again, I've known AvP was produced by Rebellion since 1994, when I bought the game. Probably way before YOU knew it was produced by Rebellion. I also pre-ordered a Playstation on launch day and picked it up from TRU on 9/9/95... Sony and the Playstation did everything right. Hyped it up really well and for great reason. There were loads of great games even in the first few months from its release.

 

The Jag CD comes packed with the VLM...one of the best pack-ins ever imo!

That's... not a game.

 

You're right.....It's BETTER than most games though!

 

Edited January 26, 2007 by kevincal