Showing posts with label between. Show all posts
Showing posts with label between. Show all posts

Sunday, March 8, 2015

What is the difference between big endian and little endian

        endian or endianness refers to the ordering of individually addressable sub-components within the representation of a larger data item as stored in external memory. The most common cases refer to how bytes are ordered within a single 16-, 32-, or 64-bit word, and endianness is then the same as byte order. The usual contrast is whether the most significant or least significant byte is ordered first.

Consider a memory location occupied by an Integer variable of 4-bytes:


Little Endian : In this the lower-order byte of the number is stored in memory at the lowest address, and the high-order byte at the highest address. For example, a 4 byte Integer

will be arranged in memory as follows:

Base Address+0 -> Byte0
Base Address+1 -> Byte1
Base Address+2 -> Byte2
Base Address+3 -> Byte3

Example: Intel processors (those used in PCs) use "Little Endian" byte order.

Big Endian: In this the high-order byte of the number is stored in memory at the lowest address, and the low-order byte at the highest address. The same 4 byte integer would be stored as:

Base Address+0 -> Byte3
Base Address+1 -> Byte2
Base Address+2 -> Byte1
Base Address+3 -> Byte0

Example: Motorola processors (those used in Macs) use "Big Endian" byte order.
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