11 ms·

I for one would go for big-endian, simply because reading memory dumps and byte blocks in assembly or elsewhere works without mental byte-swapping arithmetics f

I for one would go for big-endian, simply because reading memory dumps and byte blocks in assembly or elsewhere works without mental byte-swapping arithmetics for multi-byte entities. Just out of curiosity, I would be interested in learning why so many CPUs today are little-endian. Is it because it is cheaper / more efficient for processor implementations or is it because “the others do it, so we do it the same way”?

bombcar 6y ago
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/5185551/why-is-x86-little-endian https://stackoverflow.com/questions/5185551/why-is-x86-littl... It simplifies certain instructions internally. Practically everything is little endian because x86 won. > And if you think about a serial machine, you have to process all the addresses and data one-bit at a time, and the rational way to do that is: low-bit to high-bit because that’s the way that carry would propagate. So it means that [in] the jump instruction itself, the way the 14-bit address would be put in a serial machine is bit-backwards, as you look at it, because that’s the way you’d want to process it. Well, we were gonna built a byte-parallel machine, not bit-serial and our compromise (in the spirit of the customer and just for him), we put the bytes in backwards. We put the low- byte [first] and then the high-byte. This has since been dubbed “Little Endian” format and it’s sort of contrary to what you’d think would be natural. Well, we did it for Datapoint. As you’ll see, they never did use the [8008] chip and so it was in some sense “a mistake”, but that [Little Endian format] has lived on to the 8080 and 8086 and [is] one of the marks of this family.
- mrlonglong 6y ago
  And does middle endian even exist?
  - FabHK 6y ago
    US date format: 12/31/2021
  - bombcar 6y ago
    I suspect it does somewhere as a system that had words as the main addressable memory but also allowed byte addressing could have little endian double words but big endian ordering inside the words (as bytes).
  - tempodox 6y ago
    Not currently AFAIK, but apparently the PDP-11 had a middle-endian arch. See other comments in this thread.
anticristi 6y ago
My brain is trained to read little-endian in memory dumps. It's no different than the German "fünf-und-zwanzig" (five and twenty). :))

bombcar 6y ago

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/5185551/why-is-x86-little-endian https://stackoverflow.com/questions/5185551/why-is-x86-littl... It simplifies certain instructions internally. Practically everything is little endian because x86 won. > And if you think about a serial machine, you have to process all the addresses and data one-bit at a time, and the rational way to do that is: low-bit to high-bit because that’s the way that carry would propagate. So it means that [in] the jump instruction itself, the way the 14-bit address would be put in a serial machine is bit-backwards, as you look at it, because that’s the way you’d want to process it. Well, we were gonna built a byte-parallel machine, not bit-serial and our compromise (in the spirit of the customer and just for him), we put the bytes in backwards. We put the low- byte [first] and then the high-byte. This has since been dubbed “Little Endian” format and it’s sort of contrary to what you’d think would be natural. Well, we did it for Datapoint. As you’ll see, they never did use the [8008] chip and so it was in some sense “a mistake”, but that [Little Endian format] has lived on to the 8080 and 8086 and [is] one of the marks of this family.

mrlonglong 6y ago
And does middle endian even exist?
- FabHK 6y ago
  US date format: 12/31/2021
- bombcar 6y ago
  I suspect it does somewhere as a system that had words as the main addressable memory but also allowed byte addressing could have little endian double words but big endian ordering inside the words (as bytes).
- tempodox 6y ago
  Not currently AFAIK, but apparently the PDP-11 had a middle-endian arch. See other comments in this thread.

anticristi 6y ago

My brain is trained to read little-endian in memory dumps. It's no different than the German "fünf-und-zwanzig" (five and twenty). :))