MacIntosh Family Hardware Reference
MacIntosh Family Hardware Reference
Microcomputer Busses and Links
Microcomputer Busses and Links
Computer Engineering; A DEC View of Hardware Systems Design
Computer Engineering; A DEC View of Hardware Systems Design
The Euclidean definition of the functions div and mod
ACM Transactions on Programming Languages and Systems (TOPLAS)
Shade: a fast instruction-set simulator for execution profiling
SIGMETRICS '94 Proceedings of the 1994 ACM SIGMETRICS conference on Measurement and modeling of computer systems
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The issue of data exchange between type-1 and type-2 buses, which multiplex the first data byte (which has the lowest address) with the least and most significant portions of the address, respectively, is considered. In an analogy based on Gulliver's Travels, the associated architectures have been dubbed little-endian and big-endian processors, respectively. It is pointed out that the byte order within integers and the byte order during transmission can differ. Therefore, the big and little adjectives are used to describe the order of bytes within integers, and the acronyms Mad and Sad to describe the order of bytes (most versus least important first) during transmission on a multiplexed address-data bus. After a review of the endian ordering issues, it is concluded that big- and little-endians can use the same bus standard. For high-performance serialized buses, the mad-endian order seems superior to a sad-endian order. For consistency between serialized and multiplexed parallel buses of various widths, the mad-endian order is proposed for future multiplexed standards. To minimize the interface costs to mad-endian buses, a big-endian order is proposed for shared data also.