The endianness means the representation of a variable (if it is bigger than one byte) in the memory.

Big-Endian: Most Significant Byte (MSB) is first (bigger end is first)

Little Endian: Least Significant Byte (LSB) is first (little end is first)

CPU’s

Big-Endian:

• Motorola-6800
• Motorola-68k
• Coldfire
• System-z
• Sun-SPARC
• PowerPC (some models can be switched to little-endian)
• Atmel AVR32
• TMS9900

Little-Endian:

• 6502
• NEC-V800
• PICmicro
• Intel-x86
• Alpha
• Altera Nios
• Atmel AVR
• SH3/SH4 (some)
• VAX

Configurable:

• PowerPC (some models)
• IA-64 (Hewlett-Packard and Intel)
• ARM (and XScale, little-endian as default)

Uses

Technical

IP and Ethernet Network Byte Order: Big-Endian

Real-Life use

Big-Endian:

• written arabic numbers: 1234 (thousend-two-hundert-thirty-four)
• Time: 18:34

Little-Endian:

• European Date (dd. MM YYYY): 17. June 2015