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Out of curiosity, are there any common architectures that are wildly different on those basises from x86/x64/ARM?
by douche 11y ago
Out of curiosity, are there any common architectures that are wildly different on those basises from x86/x64/ARM?
- userbinator 11y agoI can't think of any general-purpose architectures in common use which are really odd, but some DSPs have a 24-bit "byte". The microcontroller world is a bit more diverse too, especially with many of them being Harvard architectures (e.g. C compiles to 8051 with 24-bit big-endian pointers, and the various PICs have odd instruction-word sizes like 14 bits). However, all of those still use 2's-complement integers. According to Wikipedia a few existing mainframes use 1's complement (CDC 3000/6000, UNIVAC 1100/2200). I know the standard allows different bit representations, but practically speaking, today you're almost never going to find anything other than 2's complement integers and IEEE floating-point; and if you do happen to be working on one of those rare and unusual machines that don't, I think it'd be the least of your worries... even Linus says he doesn't care about Linux running on non-two's-complement or odd byte-size machines.
- danjayh 11y agoArm and powerpc are bi-endian...