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Re:The End of x86? by nivertech on Thursday October 21, 2010 @05:43PM (#1817568)
Windows NT originally was CPU independent, but only for Little Endian architectures.
Re:The End of x86? by wolfgke on Thursday October 21, 2010 @06:33PM (#1817728)
This is no problem for ARM processors since they are bi-endian (as PowerPC).

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endianness#Bi-endian_hardware

Re:The End of x86? by RomP on Thursday October 21, 2010 @05:54PM (#1817603)
There is nothing in Windows which requires fixed endianness. While all known versions of the OS have been shipped on little-endian machines (except XBox 360, albeit running highly modified version of NT Kernel), there is very little dependency on the endianness for all modules except format parsers and network API. Changing that is a relatively simple undertaking, much simpler than building a new version of kernel, for XBox, for example
Re:The End of x86? by gecko on Thursday October 21, 2010 @05:59PM (#1817628)
That can't be correct, since I remember running Windows NT 4 on a PowerPC system.
Re:The End of x86? by tesseract on Thursday October 21, 2010 @06:09PM (#1817658)
PowerPC (except PPC970 aka G5, as I recall) is bi-endian (configurable endianness); so are Alpha and Itanium which also had Windows NT ports.
Re:The End of x86? by froydnj on Thursday October 21, 2010 @11:27PM (#1818451)
Alpha is most definitely not a bi-endian architecture; it's little-endian only. PowerPC chips can be either, but the vast, vast majority are big endian.
Re:The End of x86? by kinetik on Friday October 22, 2010 @12:19AM (#1818561)
Incorrect. The Cray T3E used Alpha processors in big-endian mode.