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Back in the late 90’s and early 00’s, there were a ton of cpu platforms around: SGI MIPS, DEC Alpha’s, Intel, Sun SPARC, etc... while I will admit it was a colossal pain working somewhere that had all of those, it was often possible to recompile from source to get things to run. I’m not suggesting it’s trivial, but given the incredible investment in ARM in the mobile space, the wind is at least at your back today. It certainly has got to be much easier than it was in the days of being the only person in the world trying to recompile an obscure open source scientific computing package for DEC Alpha. Commercial software is a different beast, but even there, the incentive will be high to do a port if lots of people start migrating to this.


Windows NT 4 supported x86, Alpha, MIPS, and PowerPC. Yikes.


All have eight bit bytes with 2's complement, same availible word sizes and float formats (with some complexity on the Alpha due to VAX compat). C code will mostly not care beyond endianness. The PDP is the strange one.




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