Subj : Re: enigma on M68K linux
To   : Digital Man
From : tenser
Date : Fri Jan 20 2023 04:45 am

On 16 Jan 2023 at 02:26p, Digital Man pondered and said...
 
 DM> I've written code for a lot of PPC-based systems, not one has ever been
 DM> little-endian. I do see they now exist, but appear to be pretty rare.

IBM did it at the request for a few big customers who were
looking to hedge against Intel dominance by diversifying away
from x86.  At least one of those customers, which has an
extremely large code base (measured in BLOC) tried BE PPC and
found there were too many hidden endian assumptions in their
code; et voila, LE PPC was the result.  In other words, software
compatibility was the driving factor for LE PPC64.

Then AMD came out with the Zen microarch series and all of a
sudden there was diversity in the x86 space and Intel no longer
had them over a barrel.  The PPC effort was largely dropped.

Then Altera came out with the N1 and the power-efficiency gains
for an organization with O(10^7) CPUs in production were too
good to pass up.  Aarch64 isn't a half-bad instruction set, at
that.

This is probably all good since Intel seems to be on the ropes.

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