Eli5: von Neumann and Harvard architectures

320 views

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?

In: 5

8 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

If the execute cycle also accesses memory, then it conflicts with another instruction fetch cycle. Modern processors fetches new instructions on every cycle so they are all modified Harvard.

You are viewing 1 out of 8 answers, click here to view all answers.