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128 Bit CPUs

H

HFS+

Senior member
SO where are the 128 bit cpus? Sony had a 128 bit cpu in the playstation 2 called the emotion engine.
 
Please clarify what you mean by 128 bits and what you expect to be improved with the change. Then people can start answering.
 
Core 2 Duo since 2006 and K10 Barcelona since 2007 and all high-end x86 processors since. If you want to count 128-bit register instructions executed in 2 cycles then Pentium 3 released in 1999.
 
HFS+ said:
SO where are the 128 bit cpus? Sony had a 128 bit cpu in the playstation 2 called the emotion engine.
Click to expand...

None have been sent back in time to kill john conor yet.

Seriously though they don't exist for consumers because 32 bit can address 4 gigabytes of memory and 64 bit cpus are supposed to be able to address 16 exabytes which is 17179869184 gigabytes. As you can see the need for 128 bit is a long way off.
 
It would actually likely make computers slower due to 128bit pointers.

Programs actually tend to grow in size when they are recompiled from 32bit to 64bit due to needing 64 bits in x64 for pointers, and thus, pieces of the program are less likely to fit in cache and thus more likely to be slower.
 
HFS+ said:
SO where are the 128 bit cpus?
Click to expand...
Hopefully in museums. Using the measurement method of console PR people, IBM's System 370, released in 1970, was 128-bit.
Sony had a 128 bit cpu in the playstation 2 called the emotion engine.
Click to expand...
😀 For people not enamored by marketeers, the PS2 had a 64-bit CPU.

Absolution75 said:
It would actually likely make computers slower due to 128bit pointers.

Programs actually tend to grow in size when they are recompiled from 32bit to 64bit due to needing 64 bits in x64 for pointers, and thus, pieces of the program are less likely to fit in cache and thus more likely to be slower.
Click to expand...
If your program has and uses enough 64-bit pointers that those 4 bytes each makes a difference, you will already have been facing major performance issues related to memory, and that will be the least of your worries (assuming 64-bit does not run faster, such as if you use 64-bit data types, or if your code could use more than 2-4 GPRs).
 
HFS+ said:
128 bit processing compared to 32 bit and 64 bit processing
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Sandybridge has AVX which can process 256-bits of data so does that make it 256-bits???

Then again if you're talking about addressing then I think it's going to stay 64-bits for a LOOOONG time.
 
He is talking about instructions. Like how the N64 was a "64 bit" processor, Dreamcast was a "128 Bit" porcessor (And PS2).

As far as I know, the "Bits" of a system or it's CPU was purely marketing gibberish. Like geebees.
 
Screw 128-bit I want zettabyte's of memory bandwidth, twelve hundred million trillion a-sexual stream processors that multiply and a self aware CPU capable of infinity operations per second.
 
Jionix said:
He is talking about instructions. Like how the N64 was a "64 bit" processor, Dreamcast was a "128 Bit" porcessor (And PS2).

As far as I know, the "Bits" of a system or it's CPU was purely marketing gibberish. Like geebees.
Click to expand...

N64's processor (NEC VR4300) is a 64-bit processor. Dreamcast's CPU is a 32-bit SH-4.
 
128-bit memory addressing is absolutely absurd.

256-bit memory addressing is even worse. At that point, you may be dealing with more bits of RAM than there are elementary particles in the universe.
 
There are many things in a computer that are measured in 'bits'.

Addressable memory, 4GB limit for 32-bit, whatever the 64 bit limit is, and we likely won't need more than that for a very long time.

Memory bus - This is just a speed related thing. Current CPUs have 128-bit memory controllers or greater, but many low end cpus and graphics cards use less, as low as 32-bit.

The size of mathematical calculations the cpu can do. The x87 extension to the x86 instruction set made cpus capable of 80-bit precision a long time ago. SSE can do 128 bit. AVX can do 256 bit.

And many more things...

There's no one measure of the bitness of a processor. Back in the day, the definition used to be the maximum precision math the cpu could do (so bulldozer and sandy bridge would be 256-bit cpus), but now it's generally the amount of addressable memory (so bulldozer and sandy bridge are 64-bit).
 
HFS+ said:
SO where are the 128 bit cpus? Sony had a 128 bit cpu in the playstation 2 called the emotion engine.
Click to expand...

and the Xbox 1 with its glorified 32bit Celeron completely pooped all over the PS2 in terms of hardware capability

as others have explained, how many "bits" a console was died with the Nintendo 64 when it became a joke

It mattered from 8 bit to 16 and then to 32, but after that it was purely marketing PR that simply went too far
 
Fox5 said:
There are many things in a computer that are measured in 'bits'.

Addressable memory, 4GB limit for 32-bit, whatever the 64 bit limit is, and we likely won't need more than that for a very long time.

Memory bus - This is just a speed related thing. Current CPUs have 128-bit memory controllers or greater, but many low end cpus and graphics cards use less, as low as 32-bit.

The size of mathematical calculations the cpu can do. The x87 extension to the x86 instruction set made cpus capable of 80-bit precision a long time ago. SSE can do 128 bit. AVX can do 256 bit.

And many more things...

There's no one measure of the bitness of a processor. Back in the day, the definition used to be the maximum precision math the cpu could do (so bulldozer and sandy bridge would be 256-bit cpus), but now it's generally the amount of addressable memory (so bulldozer and sandy bridge are 64-bit).
Click to expand...

I think the naming has more to do with how capable the registers on the CPU are.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X86-64
 
blckgrffn said:
I think the naming has more to do with how capable the registers on the CPU are.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X86-64
Click to expand...

64-bit registers determine how much memory can be utilized.
They also determine the highest precision math that can be done without special instructions.
The 64 bit cpus can hold 64 bit numbers in each register. But nothing stops a cpu from using multiple registers and instructions like SSE to go beyond that, so register size really only dictates amount of addressable memory. And even that's not true, since the PAE extensions on x86 allowed x86 to use more than 4GB before x86-64.

I'd be willing to bet most of the console cpus thought of as 64-bit or 128-bit cpus only had 32-bit registers anyway, and it was their ability to compute 64-bit or 128-bit mathematical values that people clung to. (but maybe not, the n64's cpu is listed as having a 64 bit word size, which seems excessive for 1996)
 
I doubt they will out w/ 128bit until the ram exceeds that limit or about to exceed 64bit address space. Not yet.
 
blckgrffn said:
Isn't AMD64 really only 40 bits of memory addressing anyway?

Which is still a freaking lot of memory.
Click to expand...

yes. 44 I think, and Intel is 42 or something. Plenty of memory for all. They changed up the way memory is addressed and can add more addressing down the line if they need to simply by modifying the design and it will work.
 
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