Intel Big Endian?

[engineereeyore]

So with Intel now making processors for Apple computers, will they finally make the change to Big Endian translation, or stay with little Endian? Seems it sure would make at least network programming easier if you didn't have to worry about big/little endian translation.

 

[TuxDave]

http://www.apple.com/macbookpro/

6-months earlier than planned.... sexy!

 

[Fox5]

As long as Intel is on x86, they will stay little endian. It would take a major revamp of the x86 to go big endian (most likely it'd have to go bi, like the powerpc architecture), though I think itanium is already big endian.

 

[potato28]

Drop the Netburst acharatecture, and I'll buy 1.

 

[stevty2889]

Originally posted by: potato28
Drop the Netburst acharatecture, and I'll buy 1.

Yonah isn't netburst...

 

[Markbnj]

No way they will do it on the X86 architecture. It wouldn't be a huge deal for most desktop apps, which could simply be recompiled. But Microsoft would ****** a brick, and lots of small programs, utilities and the like, would be harder to fix.

 

[Shenkoa]

Why would they switch?? have they mentioned switching or something??

Apple will just have to deal with Little Endian addressing.

 

[Fox5]

Originally posted by: Markbnj
No way they will do it on the X86 architecture. It wouldn't be a huge deal for most desktop apps, which could simply be recompiled. But Microsoft would ****** a brick, and lots of small programs, utilities and the like, would be harder to fix.

Like I said, maybe they could do bi-endian like PowerPC. That would give it backwards compatibility as well, though I'm not sure if PowerPC can switch between the two freely.

 

[pm]

Itanium supports both little-endian and big-endian.

 

[Fox5]

Originally posted by: pm
Itanium supports both little-endian and big-endian.

There you go, and since I believe I heard that a combo Itanium/Future Pentium dual core chip is in the future so Intel should eventually have support for big-endian in most of its server/workstation chips. (though honestly I don't think such a thing sounds possible, but maybe if both chips use the memory architecture?)

 

[dmens]

Having seen anything about that... ugh, supporting both would SUCK.

 

[pm]

Having seen anything about that... ugh, supporting both would SUCK.

Tell me about it. I remember the McKinley level 0 data cache store buffer circuit that I designed. I called it "The Swazzler" - 64-bits, two ports, any byte to any other byte location, with byte enables and then big endian or little endian mode... double-pumped. No, supporting both is no fun... and it's confusing too.

 

[Cooler]

Originally posted by: Fox5

Originally posted by: pm
Itanium supports both little-endian and big-endian.

There you go, and since I believe I heard that a combo Itanium/Future Pentium dual core chip is in the future so Intel should eventually have support for big-endian in most of its server/workstation chips. (though honestly I don't think such a thing sounds possible, but maybe if both chips use the memory architecture?)

And we all know how well the Itanic turned out with its 9+mb of cache.