Charles Mills wrote:
>....Absent a total re-engineering of the hardware, that will never
>change on a Z box. And if it somehow magically did change, every
>bit of Z software would have to be examined and tested and in
>many cases re-coded.
There are many "bi-endian" processors, including Power ISA processors and
the world's most numerous processors (probably in your pocket and/or on
your wrist right now): ARM architecture processors.(*) Presumably a
hypothetical bi-endian processor that supports z/Architecture would have
absolutely zero impact on software except that software developers could
optionally choose to exploit the addition as/when desired.
Please note the important word hypothetical -- and I have no inside
information here. Many, many things are technically possible in processor
designs, but whether they make sense (and enough sense) to do is a separate
issue.
(*) In principle. ARM architecture is bi-endian by design. It's even
architecturally possible to have big-endian processes running under a
little-endian supervisor, and vice versa. However, most ARM implementers
run exclusively little-endian. Taking a guess, ARM might have evolved a
bi-endian design because networks are big-endian ("network byte order"). In
ARM's traditional low power niche a big-endian capability could be (or was
imagined to be) quite useful.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Timothy Sipples
IT Architect Executive, Industry Solutions, IBM Z & LinuxONE
E-Mail: sipp...@sg.ibm.com
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