Question

what is the different between little endian and big endian on mips ?

Answer 1

Endianness is primarily expressed as big-endian or little-endian

Big and little endian hardware store in memory their Most Significant Bytes (MSB) and Least Significant Byte (LSB) in an order opposite from each other.

There is no real advantage of one over the other. The difficulties all lie in connecting systems of different types.

The reason they both exist is that back at the dawn of computing, different manufacturers happened to choose different systems. This was before machines were interconnected so it really didn’t make any difference. Since each manufacturer liked to tout “backwards compatability” there was no changing after that.

More recently, chip designers figured out how to make processors that could run in either big-endian or little-endian modes. MIPS is one example. Most MIPS run big-endian, but they work fine the other way. My old company SiCortex used little-endian MIPS CPUs mostly for data compatability with x86/

Chip makers like people to use their chips, so by having an option like this they can expand the accessible market.

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