🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <DOCONNOR.Jan431552@sedona.intel.com>,
Dennis O'Connor~ <doconnor@sedona.intel.com> wrote:
>Admit it : being order-neutral is
>slower.  Ask your typical customer wether they'd rather have a
>byte-order-neutral OS that runs slower, or a machine-order-dependant
>OS that runs faster, and which do you think they will buy ?

Of course, with respect to the standardized internet protocols,
which are big-endian, Intel Architecture chips are permanently
stuck in "backwards" byte order... so if you follow Dennis'
argument to the extreme, perhaps Dennis is advocating that people
buy non-Intel big-endian machines for network applications.
As a fellow Intel employee, this disturbs me. :-) :-) :-)

More seriously, I completely disagree with Dennis.  I don't see
any great advantage to standardizing a byte order in an OS, since
no matter which order you standardize you disagree with about half
the world.  (Internet protocols are big endian, most on-disk data
structures in PC applications are little-endian.)

Since this is comp.arch, does anybody have any actual performance
numbers for the costs of byte swapping?
--
Mike Haertel <haertel@ichips.intel.com>
Not speaking for intel.