why would you doubt the processor is 128bit? it's CISC, not RISC like a desktop processor (or is it the other way around? i get em confused). in any case, the PS2 has been out for a few years and so have 128 bit CPUs so you're a bit behind the times that's like saying you dont think any airplane is capable of breaking the speed of sound. ok that's probably too extreme of an example. i apologize.
PCs are CISC (Complex Instruction set). The PS2 is RISC (Redduced Instruction set). PCs have to be CISC to be compatible with legacy apps. RISC is more efficient IIRC.
RISC can go through an instruction cycle faster, but need a lot more instructions per program (in a full program anyway) than a CISC processor. The main ideas behind it were more a design philosophy to make simpler processor designs than for real efficiency reasons. And pcs arent CISC cos they need 2 b for legacy apps. When apple made the switch from CISC to RISC design for the mac, it kept about 90% of its legacy code working. Its more cos its how intel and amd etc like 2 design their desktop market chips.
Technically on the outside of the processor we can treat the x86 architecture as a CISC system, but on the inside in newer generations to get more speed it is actually breaking down the macro-operations into micro-ops which are each executed in one CPU cycle. They call this the "EPIC" style architecture, and is essentially a RISC style execution core with a CISC outside wrapper. This allows assemblers to create x86 machine code out of any object code from a programming language compiler and maintain compatibility across the new Pentium 4 line as well as the older CPUs. I believe AMD has a similar but slightly different approach.
Anyway, I'm not an expert but that's what I understood from someone else talking about it...
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