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.
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.
Read more about Harvard Architecture: Memory Details, Speed, Modern Uses of The Harvard Architecture
Famous quotes containing the words harvard and/or architecture:
“Our eldest boy, Bob, has been away from us nearly a year at school, and will enter Harvard University this month. He promises very well, considering we never controlled him much.”
—Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865)
“And when his hours are numbered, and the world
Is all his own, retiring, as he were not,
Leaves, when the sun appears, astonished Art
To mimic in slow structures, stone by stone,
Built in an age, the mad wind’s night-work,
The frolic architecture of the snow.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)