bi-endian

Silicon schizophrenia. Processors and other chips that have can be switched to work in big-endian or little-endian mode.

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

This article is provided by FOLDOC - Free Online Dictionary of Computing (foldoc.org)

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.

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References in periodicals archive ?

IRI's ability to maintain and change the endianness of data means that files can be correctly processed on big, little, or bi-endian hardware.

IRI SOFTWARE SOVES "ENDIAN" PROBLEM

Alpha AXP implementations are bi-endian, allowing data to be accessed using either a little-endian view (byte 0 is the low byte of an integer), or a big-endian view (byte 0 is the high byte of an integer).