There is absolutely nothing novel or unique to ARM being "bi-endian" on 32 bit.
This was part of PowerPC specification way back in the early '90s.
However 32 bit x86 has always been little endian. Even silly "virtual CPU" like TAO's "Elate" (aka AmigaDE) were little endian and suffered a huge performance penalty when being run on a big endian CPU (which is rather idiotic on a virtual CPU if you ask me).
This also means that the firmware of many graphics cards require little endian.
Hyperion has spent many years porting x86 to big endian systems (AmigaOS, MacOS) and one of the hardest and most time consuming parts were often related to endianness.
Yes, you can switch a PowerPC to little endian with many ISA's. But this results in a lot of performance hits running 68K native programs. Many games we ported were hardwired to little endian and rooting out these hardcoded little endian issues was a massive undertaking.
AmigaOS is a 32 bit big Endian oriented operating system, be it 68K or PPC.
Or any other 32 bit Big Endian cpu.
Quote:
Really? so the endianess?? the byte orientation is the main obstacle?
Yes. The byte orientation is the main obstacle.
Quote:
Is ARM Little endian though? ARM (like most RISC) architectures is what the call biendian. Biendian means that is can run as bigendian or littleendian. The standard way of doing things in ARM is to come up in little endian the switch to bigendian if you want to, or set one of the control lines on the CPU to come up in bigendian mode.
The whole point of use 32 bit Big Endian cpu is to use old code in C made for Amiga without modification. On ppc or any other 32 bit Big Endian cpu it is possible to use twenty or more year code in C , just recompile it, and it will work. Thats why ppc Amiga feel like better Amiga than these made by Commodore.
14 crawler(s) on-line.
93 guest(s) on-line.
1 member(s) on-line.
Hyperion-Director 
