[cyphar]

> > Integers use little-endian byte order because most CPUs are little-endian, and even big-endian CPUs usually have instructions for reading little-endian data.

> sob There are a lot of things Intel has to account for, and frankly little-endian byte order isn't the worst of them, but it's pretty rotten. Writing 'EFCDAB8967452301' for 0x0123456789ABCDEF is perverse in the extreme. Why? Why?

Little endian means that a CPU designer can make buses shorter, which makes the CPU more efficient and smaller. There are also several benefits from the programming side. So it is actually better than big endian in /some/ cases, at the cost of being less intuitive to humans.

So while Intel did choose little endian, they had very good reason to (and it's probably why everything except SystemZ and POWER use it).

[makomk]

Hah. According to Wikipedia: "The Datapoint 2200 used simple bit-serial logic with little-endian to facilitate carry propagation. When Intel developed the 8008 microprocessor for Datapoint, they used little-endian for compatibility. However, as Intel was unable to deliver the 8008 in time, Datapoint used a medium scale integration equivalent, but the little-endianness was retained in most Intel designs." Which I guess is a reason to use little-endian, though not one that's really relevant to anyone that's ever actually used an Intel CPU. (ARM, incidentally, was little-endian by default because the 6502 was.)

[gpderetta]

AFAIK, POWER has supported LE for a while and at least linux on Power has moved to LE by default.