POWER8 (not yet shipping) has far better little-endian support than prior PPC chips (many converted to/from big-endian when in little-endian mode!), as many cus

POWER8 (not yet shipping) has far better little-endian support than prior PPC chips (many converted to/from big-endian when in little-endian mode!), as many customers of IBM apparently want better little-endian support (either to interface with existing little-endian hardware, to be more similar to other hardware, etc.), and IBM is paying for almost all the engineering work going on for the ppc64le ports. IBM need the software to work to be able to sell the hardware, so they're investing a lot in this.