Intel uses which endian

Type "show copying" and "show warranty" for details. Type "show configuration" for configuration details. For help, type "help". Type "apropos word" to search for commands related to "word" Reading symbols from. Share this: Twitter Facebook. Like this: Like Loading Leave a Reply Cancel reply Enter your comment here Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:. Email required Address never made public.

Name required. Follow this blog. Follow Following. Taufan Lubis - Ubuntu Linux Join 88 other followers. Sign me up. Already have a WordPress. Shustek : So, for example, storing numbers least significant byte first, came from the fact that this was serial and you needed to process the low bits first.

Poor: You had to do it that way. You had no choice. The "had no choice" remark is odd, that appears to only apply to the bit-serial design of the MSI processor. Also the reason they shopped for shift registers instead of RAM.

It comes up again at page Hendrie: Do you remember any of the push backs from them about the design or any of those details Poor: One of them was the one bit versus 8-bit. They wanted an 8-bit wide part and, ultimately, that's how they built it. Poor: But it was still recirculating. But, you see, there are interesting points whether there's going to be a big end or a little end part could have been changed at that point but we didn't. We just left it Hendrie: Even after you went to eight bits?

Poor: Right. Which is why the Intel product line is that way today. Stan Mazor of Intel, who worked on the designs and , elaborates on the "push back" in Oral History Panel on Intel Microprocessor :.

And lastly, the original design for Datapoint 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. Well, we did it for Datapoint.

So, Intel wanted to build byte-parallel CPU with 8 separate pins for accesses to data bus. The reason why Intel insisted on the compromise is explained in "Intel Microprocessors: to " by Stephen P.

Morse et all:. This inverted storage, which was to haunt all processors evolved from , was a result of compatibility with the Datapoint bit-serial processor, which processes addresses from low bit to high bit. This inverted storage did have a virtue in those early days when by 8 memory chips were popular: it allowed all memory chips to select a byte and latch it for output while waiting for the six high-order bits which selected the chip.

This speeded up memory accesses. Ultimately CTC did not use the , it was finished a year too late and they had already implemented the MSI processor by then. The micro-processor design was certainly CTC's intellectual property, they however traded the rights to it with Intel for the design cost.

Bit of a mistake : Law suits about patent rights followed later. It reflects the difference between considering memory to always be organized a byte at a time versus considering it to be organized a unit at a time, where the size of the unit can vary byte, word, dword, etc.

Stack Overflow for Teams — Collaborate and share knowledge with a private group. Create a free Team What is Teams? Collectives on Stack Overflow. Learn more. Why is x86 little endian? Hence, endianness concerns only multi-bytes data e.

As you can see in the figure above, big-endian stores the most significant byte in the smallest address. As you can see, contrary to big-endian, little-endian stores the least significant byte in the smallest address. On the other hand, when processor loads a data from memory to register the other way round , in both big-endian and little-endian cases, bites are moved back as stored So, the only the direction of each arrow changes to the opposite direction. Hence, the value in register before and after storing it to memory represents the identical value as long as it is stored and read on the machines that use the same endian.

This is why you do not need to worry about endianness as long as your program scope ends within a single machine. The below is a sample program that checks the endian of the processor it is running on at run time. This is done in order to access the byte of the smallest address of the value later. The program checks the first byte by dereferencing the cptr pointer.

It is usually not often the case that you need to worry about endianness when you program codes. Basically, endianness matters when you are at the boarder of the system. It matters if your program deals with transferring raw data between systems that use different processors with different endianness.

In particular, when. This is why big-endian is sometimes called network byte order. If you need to detect and convert the order of bytes like when you are using machine with little-endian processor and you have to send data over network with big-endian, luckily there are some utilities we can use in addition to writing a simple program like the one mentioned above.

The first ones are called htonl, htons, ntohl, ntohs. It can be used to convert the byte order of the data.