Eli5: von Neumann and Harvard architectures

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The video I’m watching about the two architectures says that Harvard architectures “can fetch instructions at the same time as reading/writing data”. This makes sense, but how is this different from pipelining? Can’t be von Neumann architectures do this as well? It also says that Von Neumann architectures follow a linear fetch, decode, execute cycle. Again, this doesn’t make sense to me. Surely pipelining means that they don’t have to do this, right?

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Anonymous 0 Comments

von Neumann has a single memory for everything, data and code so it can’t fetch code and read/write data at the same time. Harvard has separate memories for data and code so it can fetch code at the same time as it’s reading/writing data.

pipelining is a separate concept, both can be pipelined, but the case of von Neumann the fetch will have to wait if the execute needs to access data

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