I was asked about the architecture difference between the Harward model and the von Neumann model during an interview. Shame! Shame! Shame! I only rememeber Harward was faster in certain mathematical calculation, such as Fourier transform.
Here is something I extracted from wikipedia.org.
Harward has the physically separated data and instruction storage and pathways, which means it has the capability to read instruction and read/write data at the same time. Obviously, this is not possible in the classical x86 architecure, since our data and instruction are all stored in the ram (from hardisk) and read/write through the shared data/address bus. One thing has to note: the cache. We are talking about the case of von Neumann model without cache here.
