PowerPC vs x86: Endianess

The battle between PPC and X86 wages on, and this video takes a stance through demonstrating the advantaged of big endian over little endian. With some random 80's pop mix thrown in to keep things moving and some industry standard tests this video probably isn't worth your time.

Category:

People & Blogs

Tags:

• ppc
• x86
• mac
• apple
• powerpc
• satire
• spec

[diin2live]

this is retarded... big endian isn't more stable than little endian, its just a way of representing data... it has nothing to do with speed or efficiency of the processor... if anything, little endian is more efficient to work with for calculations involving reading/writing/manipulating memory

[kwegibu]

I'm not sure if you noticed or not...but the way my data is represented happens to be Grade A Eggs. Have you ever tried to balance an egg on the little end? Can't be done! Thus its less stable. What does that say about little endian from a processor architecture stand point? Absolutely nothing. I was always amused by technology borrowing "Endianness" from Gulliver's Travels where it originally referred to Eggs. This Joke is an expression of that amusement and inherently retarded. Laugh or don't.

[Kzb75]

NASA still uses allot of PowerPC boards, Chips

Playstation 3 uses a PowerPC 9 core CPU while

while Intel only has 4 cores per CPU

its really sad Apple did the switch, but for better mass production to compete with the supply n demand Intel was a good choice,

Mac OSX was always x86 & PowerPC compatible, check out an old copy of 10.0.1 if you don't believe me

I'm sure Apple will switch back in a few years,

Mac OSX is still gonna be ported to the PowerPC chips for quite a while im sure.

[Membrane556]

Many risc cpus such as ARM and some PPCs can be ran big ended or small ended.

Endianess is just a means o representing the data on wither the MSB or LSB s first.

Though I'll admit the X86 instruction set is one of the most horrid instruction sets ever devised.

[iover9000]

this is genius.

[Athos523]

@Kzb75 eh i don't think apple will switch back to powerpc anytime soon, unless they can find a way to make the next one powerful and energy efficient unlike the g5.

[donkeyass5042]

hahahahaha that was so fucking stupid lolz

[EddieBear631]

So this conclusively proves that the PPC may be a bit slower, but the Intel is more like to break the "shell". roflmfao!

[acharad]

Plus Failed Scalability and Very hard production availability of current RISC processors... And in nowadays intel cpus, little endian processing is just a JIT emulation.

Just after "Yonah" intel chipsets, architecture is so similar to risc cpus with long pipelines,that allows fetch more data from cache.

Also, powerpc cpus had to increase their byte registers on die to access higher speeds.

That would be a waste of money ,too

This is a co-reason for global switching to x86/x64

[pastryhat]

apple switched to Intel for two small reasons. It would allow for better compatibility with the windows world. you will also notice that there never was a macbook g5. this is becuase the g5 used a lot of power. intel is more eificient, but not nessasarilly better.

[acharad]

Thanks for fun,

Then explain why even apple had switched to Intel !

[joker71496]

my power PC G4 in my emac dosn't have lepards tranparnt task bar wtf

[planefreak3]

can someone tell me which is truely better, powerpc or intel?

[OtakuBozu]

Actually, PowerPC is designed to be capable of running in either big-endian or little-endian mode, and until the G5, it was able to switch from one mode to the other without needing to re-boot. The G5 lost this ability, which is one reason why VirtualPC had to be re-written almost from square one to be able to run on the G5.