Endian-ness

WinHex & X-Ways

Endian-ness

 

Microprocessors differ in the position of the least significant byte: Intel®, MIPS®, National Semiconductor, and VAX processors have the least significant byte first. A multi-byte value is stored in memory from the lowest byte (the "little end") to the highest byte. For example, the hexadecimal value 12345678 is stored as 78 56 34 12. This is called the little-endian format.

 

Motorola and Sparc processors have the least significant byte last. A multi-byte value is stored in memory from the highest byte (the "big end") to the lowest byte. For example, the hexadecimal value 12345678 is stored as 12 34 56 78.  This is called the big-endian format.