[Raion]

I wouldn't compare the MIPS II/III to MIPS32/64 transition that happened in the embedded space with what happened with the POWER side of things.

Without getting into an argument about it the benefits of transitioning away from big endian are immense especially on the driver front. If you want beyond OpenGL 3, or get Vulkan, OpenCL, JIT for firefox etc, it's pretty damn imperative to get off big endian. Unfortunately, as sad as I am to say it, Apple PowerPC hobbyists are holding us back there. Talos is as cheap as it ever is gonna get without a serious volume jump and because hobbyists chickened out at the price we may not see a TALOS III, let alone cheaper hardware for POWER. I'll leave it at that lest I go ranting about why the PPC970 community in particular should have shut up.