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Pardon my ignorance on the subject but is there any reason to prefer little endian POWER over big endian?
by ianlevesque 11y ago
Pardon my ignorance on the subject but is there any reason to prefer little endian POWER over big endian?
- daxtens 11y agoIt makes porting non-endian-aware software much easier. If you've written software that, for example, serialises data to disk, or sends and receives it over the network, and you haven't specifically coded for it, you can get a bit of a shock when you change endians.
- andreiw 11y agoThe hearsay is that Power8 and GPUs seem like a convenient marriage as far as HPC in the data center goes, and GPUs are little endian. And although part of the problems are solvable at the driver level, no one wants to spend time making all of the existing userspace GPU stuff endian clean. But maybe that's just rumors. From a personal perspective, I think no one will ever willingly bother investing into converting code to become endian safe. Especially so when dealing with complex (or systems) software. It's a real shame that in the 21st century we can't settle on something so basic as byte order.