Translations:Handbook:MIPS/Blocks/HWReqs/9/en

Also, another important concept to grasp is the concept of endianness. Endianness refers to the way that a CPU reads words from main memory. A word can be read as either big endian (most significant byte first), or little endian (least significant byte first). Intel x86 machines are generally Little endian, whilst Apple and Sparc machines are Big Endian. On MIPS, they can be either. To separate them apart, we append el to the architecture name to denote little endian.