Re: VON NEUMANN VS HARVARD

"UFO Joe" <UFO-Joe@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Excerpted from AVR Butterfly Site at: http://retrodan.tripod.com

VON NEUMANN vs. HARVARD ARCHITECTURE

If you are new to Microcontrollers one of the arguments you are going to
hear bantered about is Harvard Architecture versus the Von Neumann
Architecture.


In my opinion everything that uses the harvard architecture is very,
very outdated.

The main problem with the HA is that you have seperate memory spaces.
C doesn't like that. You'll have to test which memory space a pointer
is pointing to. Functions like memcpy, printf, etc, etc, won't work
with any pointer. Ofcourse you can kludge things together, but in the
end you'll find yourself locked to that target. With ever shorter
product life times you'll want to move your code to other platforms or
develop on a PC and then transfer the algorithm to an embedded device.

Modern processors use an instruction and data cache which basically
'emulate' the harvard architecture without its downsides.

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