> If you mean go from 32 bit to 16 bit, that's still trivial with big-endian, you just shift. Surely you would agree that moves are easier than shifts? Moves

> If you mean go from 32 bit to 16 bit, that's still trivial with big-endian, you just shift. Surely you would agree that moves are easier than shifts? Moves can be handled by the renamer and be effectively free (even for memory operands, on CISC, with the advent of memory renamers; but this is even more important for RISC, where what would otherwise have been a load followed by a shift can just be a load), whereas shifts cannot and must take up some fraction of a cycle.