Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

I wouldn't call this Harvard. It has ICCM/DCCM (closely-coupled memories) that appear to be strict (i.e. core cannot ld/st to ICCM), but everything is in the same (physical) address space, and the CCMs are just mapped into that space. In that sense, the ICCM is not much different from having a ROM in the memory map, which isn't usually seen as making something a harvard architecture.

In my view, RISC-V pretty much precludes a hard Harvard architecture. The fact that RISCV has a FENCE.I instruction that "synchronizes the instruction and data streams" means that a RISC-V implementation can't really be strictly Harvard, since if it was it wouldn't make much sense to invalidate the icache.

This core has an icache, but that also doesn't make it a Harvard architecture. As long as the backing store of both the icache and the dcache is the same, it won't be any more difficult to work with than any other modern modified Harvard architecture (read: pretty much every computer system in every desktop, laptop, phone, etc in the last decades).



Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: