bi-endian

bi-endian

Silicon schizophrenia. Processors and other chips that havecan be switched to work in big-endian or little-endianmode.

The PowerPC chip has this ability, which allows it to runthe little-endian Windows NT, or the big-endian Mac OS/PPC.

bi-endian

The ability to switch between big endian and little endian ordering. For example, the PowerPC is a bi-endian CPU. See byte order.