3 ms·

Windows NT originally was CPU independent, but only for Little Endian architectures.

• RomP 16y ago
  There is nothing in Windows which requires fixed endianness. While all known versions of the OS have been shipped on little-endian machines (except XBox 360, albeit running highly modified version of NT Kernel), there is very little dependency on the endianness for all modules except format parsers and network API. Changing that is a relatively simple undertaking, much simpler than building a new version of kernel, for XBox, for example
• gecko 16y ago
  That can't be correct, since I remember running Windows NT 4 on a PowerPC system.
  • tesseract 16y ago
    PowerPC (except PPC970 aka G5, as I recall) is bi-endian (configurable endianness); so are Alpha and Itanium which also had Windows NT ports.
    • froydnj 16y ago
      Alpha is most definitely not a bi-endian architecture; it's little-endian only. PowerPC chips can be either, but the vast, vast majority are big endian.
      • kinetik 16y ago
        Incorrect. The Cray T3E used Alpha processors in big-endian mode.
• wolfgke 16y ago
  This is no problem for ARM processors since they are bi-endian (as PowerPC). Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endianness#Bi-endian_hardware http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endianness#Bi-endian_hardware