big endian
During load and store operations in registers and memories, the bytes are read in a different order. This byte order is called endianness. Endianness is distinguished between little-endian format and big-endian format.
Big Endian and Little Endian are concerned with the classification of the valence. In the place value system, each digit of a number is assigned a valence. The place value system applies to decimal numbers, but also to other number systems such as the dual system, octal system or hexadecimal system. In Big Endian, the digits with the highest valence are at the beginning, in Little Endian, the digits with the lowest valence are at the beginning. Thus, for the hexadecimal number 3E5A, the digit-letter combination 3E has the highest valence and thus represents the representation in Big Endian format. In little-endian format, the digit-letter combination 5A comes first.
The big-endian format is a data format for transmitting or storing binary data in which the most significant byte or bit ( MSB) comes first. A big-endian system stores higher-order bytes at the lowest addresses. Referring to the previously mentioned example, the combination 3E is stored on the lowest memory address (1000). The combination 5A is stored on the following memory address 1001. The two formats can be switched over by converters. So that program developers can work in the desired format.
The big-endian format is used by mainframe processors, some RISC architectures and by minicomputers. InTCP/ IP networks the byte arrangement is done in big-endian format. Motorola's MC68000, Scalable Processor Architecture( SPARC), IBM PowerPC and others work according to the big-endian method.