Modified Harvard Architecture - Modern Uses of The Modified Harvard Architecture

Modern Uses of The Modified Harvard Architecture

Outside of applications where a cacheless DSP or microcontroller is required, most modern processors have a CPU cache which partitions instruction and data.

There are also processors which are Harvard machines by the most rigorous definition (that program and data memory occupy different address spaces), and are only modified in the weak sense that there are operations to read and/or write program memory as data. For example, LPM (Load Program Memory) and SPM (Store Program Memory) instructions in the Atmel AVR implement such a modification. Similar solutions are found in other microcontrollers such as the PIC and Z8Encore!, many families of digital signal processors such as the TI C55x cores, and more. Because instruction execution is still restricted to the program address space, these processors are very unlike von Neumann machines.

Having separate address spaces creates certain difficulties in programming with high-level languages such as C, which don't directly support the notion that tables of read-only data might be in a different address space from normal writable data (and thus need to be read using different instructions).

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