HACKER Q&A
📣 iamdvlpr

Are any computer architecture out there to compete with VonNeumann's?


VonNewmann's architecture has been around for quite a while - and as a software engineer I am very grateful for that, don't get me wrong. On the other hand, new programming languages keep popping up every year - okay, I'm being a bit dramatic here.

Is there any interesting project or study in the computer architecture space you would recommend? Particularly one where it could eventually compete with VonNeumann's for the mainstream or more specifically to compete for personal computing in large scale?

My thoughts on this come from this paper - https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/359576.359579 and this video from Bell Labs back in the day - https://youtu.be/tc4ROCJYbm0

  👤 hyperman1 Accepted Answer ✓
Security features are slowly transforming some CPUs away from Von Neumann and into Modified Harvard architecture

Take the x64 feature W^X . When enabled, you have 2 kinds of memory pages. Some contain code and some have program-created data. OS mechanisms allow for a controlled way to change this data into code by modifying page table flags. That’s a modified harvard architecture.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modified_Harvard_architectur...

👤 ttyprintk
Neither Harvard nor Von Neumann are described in a scalable way. Maybe a contentious opinion, but I don’t think either copes with multiple CPU and virtual memory.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harvard_architecture