system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
In 1996, the nintendo 64 was released and was '64' bit. The dreamcast which followed was billed as 128 bit. Why did it take so long for 64 bit home PCs to arrive and what's different between a 64 bit PC and a 128 bit dreamcast?

At the time I generally accepted the more bits equals more betterer kind of marketing that these consoles used, but presumably a dreamcast does not outclass a modern home PC in terms of processing power or graphical ability. What did the number of bits mean in a 90's console context and how did it differ to what it means in an average, current, home PC context?
gpt
"128 bits" in consoles was just marketing. The CPUs were not 128bit like the N64 was 64 bit. The memory bus might have been 128 bit but that is completely unrelated to how many bits the CPU operates with internally. A 128bit memory bus is basically just having a wider "highway" into the CPU, not changing anything inside the CPU itself. It's also not really relevant. A wider memory bus *can* allow for higher transfer speeds, but the speed of each lane matters too. Total data per second is what you really want, and widening the bus is *one* way to do that.

The N64 did not utilize the major strengths that 64 bit systems supply, which is the ability to address more than 4 GB of memory. PCs did not really require 64 bit CPUs and operating systems until 4+ GB of RAM became commonplace. The N64 didn't even have 1/100th of that.