Question

Problem 5. It is the next installment of the ECE 5484 Scavenger Hunt! Two pioneers of early computers and computer organization were Howard H. Aiken and John von Neumann. Answer the questions below regarding Aiken and von Neumann. Cite sources used for your answers. a) Is Aiken or von Neumann associated with the so-called Princeton architecture? b) Is Aiken or von Neumann associated with the so-called Harvard architecture? c) Briefly, and in your own words, what is the key feature of a Princeton architecture computer compared to the Harvard architecture? d) Does the MARIE architecture owe more to Aiken or von Neumann? In your own words, briefly justify your answer

Answer 1

a) Yes, Von Neumann is associated with the von-neumann architecture and this is also known as Prinston Architecture. Von neumann who is a mathematician who invented this architecture in such a way that it stores the instructions in a binary format such as 0's and 1's and it will process the instructions sequentially in the order which was given. This became so popular and this architecture concept is the major concept for all the computer design's from then on.

b) Yes, Aiken is associated with the Harvard Architecture.This is the architecture before the von-neomann architecture. This was designed by Howard Aiken at Harvard university which became the architecture name as Harvard Architecture. In this unlike the von neumann there are two buses available which leads to the higher performance than von-neumann.

c) The key feature of the Princeton architecture computer is it will use the same address space for both data and instruction set where as in the Harvard architecture it is having 2 seperate buses for these. Because of this there will be only source if addresses will be there from instruction processing unit to memory, because of this instructions can be processed as data. For this princeton architecture this is the benifit as well as drawback.

d) Marie Architecture owe's more to Von-Neumann architecture the Marie architecture itself is the simple implementation of Von-Nuemann architecture with simple memory and and CPU to process the data and instructions.