Big Endian vs Little Endian

Microprocessor architectures commonly use two different methods to store individual bytes in memory. This difference is referred to as “byte ordering” or “endianness”.

• Little Endian

Intel x86 processors store a two-byte integer with the least significant byte first, followed by the most significant byte. This is called little-endian byte ordering.

• Big Endian

In big-endian byte order, the most significant byte is stored at the lowest memory address, and the least significant byte is stored at the highest memory address. Older PowerPC and Motorola 68k architectures often use big-endian. Big-endian is also used in network communications.

Byte ordering becomes significant when data is transferred between systems or processed by systems with different endianness. It's important to handle byte order correctly to ensure consistent data interpretation across diverse systems.