Slight correction to the video: It looks like NEC (Nippon Electric Company) were actually the ones that designed most of the CPU core here, so give them the credit instead of SGI. Correction correction: Apparently it was SGI after all? I have no idea. someone else can argue this out. I doesn't really matter to me or the video.

Sounds like N64 emulators are just going to have to use your game as an accuracy benchmark.

Create_Dirty_Exclusive sounds like the general idea behind Conker's Bad Fur Day

Kaze seems to have blown past the RTX 5090 phase of development and discovered that the N64 has a pseudo-quantum computer inside

18:00 this trick is called Cache-As-RAM (CAR) and as far as I know it is used by BIOS code in most (all?) PCs. In the earliest part of the boot process you simply do not have any RAM yet, since DDR RAM initialization is so complicated. So when modern x86 CPUs come out of reset, they need to start executing code to initialize their memory controller, so for this CAR is used.

So basically, you're taking a couple of cachelines and telling them "you don't cache any more, you are now extra CPU registers." Brilliant.

2035: Kaze manages to run Crysis on N64 by using instructions that theoretically doesn't even exist

N64 developers: "Well excuse me we didn't have 20 years to study the architecture and had to ship something by the end of the month!"

bro explained the N64 like a country

I am not using quantum physics in my Mario 64 mod YET. Famous last words.

first time a bus has been mentioned in an n64 video without it being "Imagine a bus"

I am not using this information, I am not making a N64 game. I'm just watching this because I can.

Essentially you're using dynamic ranges of cache as a sort of register-window; bravo! I've not seen this sort of cache-line optimization talk outside of Linux kernel specific talks before. Excellent!

Rambus was finally going vroom vroom, but now it's retired :(

Next video: "the N64 was actually capable of finding the cure for cancer, but no game ever used that feature"

Nintendo: *releases N64 specs & development docs* SGI: look how they massacred my boy Edit: Tbf, this is basically software engineering in a nutshell. Hardware folks come up with some rocket science bullshit to squeeze extra perf out of the silicon, and the software people waste all of that work by having compilers ignore modern special-purpose instructions for the sake of backwards compatibility, and putting the entire program behind all the polymorphism, virtual functions, dependency injections, virtual machines & interpreters, and God knows how many other abstractions and obfuscations. Despite the different nature of software optimization then vs. now, it boils down to a similar amount of fundamentally misunderstanding how the hardware actually functions that led to most of the N64 library having lackluster performance. Modern apps are written like a labyrinth, and the CPU is given the unreasonable task of translating the map from a foreign language and solving the labyrinth as quickly as possible. This is often why modern software is ~1000x slower than it could be.

2:09 As someone who did maths for their undergrad, I can confirm, I have absolutely no memory (its kinda why generality and derivations from first principles appeal in the first place).

Wait, why is this legitimately a good way to explain how a CPU works?

Being a pioneer for a 30 year old console, what a time to be alive.

Kaze : "Alright, full disclosure : i am not using quantum physics in my mario 64 mod-" Also Kaze : "-YET" At this rate we'll have ray tracing in RtYI by the time it releases.