Hello. As for Harvard vs Von Neumann architecture, I read that Harvard has one memory for data and instructions while V.N has two different memory systems, one for data and one for instructions.
I don’t quite understand this difference. What specifically is the difference between **instructions and data**? Aren’t all instructions data? And what kind of memory are we talking about here? RAM or CPU cache?
Thank you.
In: Technology
You’ve got the architectures switched. The von Neumann architecture makes no distinction between data and instruction memory while the Harvard architecture does.
Why instructions and data may be separated is that in early computers the instructions were stored on punched-cards or tape and working data was stored in another format. In fact, many early computers couldn’t modify the code they were running in any form and thus it didn’t make sense for that code to be part of the *limited* memory space available.
These architectures were defined before CPU caches or even RAM that was entirely separate from the CPU were a thing.
Additionally the term “Harvard architecture” was used to describe some early computers built at Harvard University, but years after the fact, by people not associated with Harvard.
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