alt Hacker News> It's a 64 bit CPU, [...]
Only really in the marketing material. It's a bit like calling a 386 with an arithmetic co-processor an 80 bit machine, when it was still clearly a 32 bit machine by all metrics that matter.
However, I agree in general that the N64 CPU sits idle a lot of the time. It's overspecced compared to the rest of the system.
no, it really is a true 64 bit CPU. it's just that that fact is useless and it usually runs in 32 bit mode because games don't need that.