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Date:      Thu, 27 Aug 1998 15:01:23 -0700
From:      Jason Thorpe <thorpej@nas.nasa.gov>
To:        Warner Losh <imp@village.org>
Cc:        Roger Hardiman <roger@cs.strath.ac.uk>, freebsd-alpha@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject:   Re: FreeBSD Alpha. Which endian? 
Message-ID:  <199808272201.PAA00731@lestat.nas.nasa.gov>

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On Thu, 27 Aug 1998 13:59:04 -0600 
 Warner Losh <imp@village.org> wrote:

 > No.  AFAIK, the alpha has never supported this.  The only processor
 > family on the planet that did this was the MIPS family, and some of
 > its successors.  Some of them even did this at run time (rather than
 > at board design time[**]), but no operating system seems to have
 > successfully taken advantage of this[*].

The Alpha can be wired big-endian, but it requires custom PALcode, etc.  The
Cray T3 was like this.

PowerPCs are also bi-endian, run-time switchable.  The PA-RISC (at least
the version in those cute little HP 9000/712s) is also bi-endian.

Jason R. Thorpe                                       thorpej@nas.nasa.gov
NASA Ames Research Center                            Home: +1 408 866 1912
NAS: M/S 258-5                                       Work: +1 650 604 0935
Moffett Field, CA 94035                             Pager: +1 650 940 5942

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