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Harvard architecture
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The Harvard architecture is a computer architecture with physically separate storage and signal pathways for instructions and data. The term originated from the Harvard Mark I relay-based computer, which stored instructions on punched tape (24 bits wide) and data in electro-mechanical counters. These early machines had data storage entirely contained within the central processing unit, and provided no access to the instruction storage as data. Programs needed to be loaded by an operator; the processor could not boot itself.
Harvard architecture
Today, most processors implement such separate signal pathways for performance reasons but actually implement a modified Harvard architecture, so they can support tasks such as loading a program from disk storage as data and then executing it.
Contents
1 Memory details 1.1 Contrast with von Neumann architectures 1.2 Contrast with modified Harvard architecture 2 Speed 2.1 Internal vs. external design 3 Modern uses of the Harvard architecture 4 External links
Memory details
In a Harvard architecture, there is no need to make the two memories share characteristics. In particular, the word width, timing, implementation technology, and memory address structure can differ. In some systems, instructions can be stored in read-only memory while data memory generally requires read-write memory. In some systems, there is much more instruction memory than data memory so instruction addresses are wider than data addresses.
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Also, a Harvard architecture machine has distinct code and data address spaces: instruction address zero is not the same as data address zero. Instruction address zero might identify a twenty-four bit value, while data address zero might indicate an eight bit byte that isn't part of that twenty-four bit value.
Speed
In recent years, the speed of the CPU has grown many times in comparison to the access speed of the main memory. Care needs to be taken to reduce the number of times main memory is accessed in order to maintain performance. If, for instance, every instruction run in the CPU requires an access to memory, the computer gains nothing for increased CPU speeda problem referred to as being "memory bound". It is possible to make extremely fast memory but this is only practical for small amounts of memory for cost, power and signal routing reasons. The solution is to provide a small amount of very fast memory known as a CPU cache which holds recently accessed data. As long as the data that the CPU needs is in the cache, the performance hit is much smaller than it is when the cache has to get the data from the main memory.
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just-written instructions.
External links
Harvard vs Von Neumann (http://infocenter.arm.com/help/topic/com.arm.doc.faqs/ka11516.html) ARM Information center (http://infocenter.arm.com/help/index.jsp) Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Harvard_architecture&oldid=571454357" Categories: Computer architecture Classes of computers This page was last modified on 4 September 2013 at 01:50. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License; additional terms may apply. By using this site, you agree to the Terms of Use and Privacy Policy. Wikipedia is a registered trademark of the Wikimedia Foundation, Inc., a non-profit organization.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harvard_architecture
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