I was under the impression that the Raspberry Pi's ARM processor, although having an armhf microarchitecture, still followed the Von Neumann architecture (principally sharing main memory for instructions and data).
However I came across this single line in a Computer Science textbook (A Level Computer Science for AQA Unit 2, Kevin R Bond 2016, pg265)
The Raspberry Pi computer is based on the Harvard architecture
Having searched online, I can't find any solid sources that either prove or disprove this statement. Is this in error? I would appreciate a source given in an answer.
(I'm aware the Raspberry Pi SE exists, but given the fact that the tag does not exist there, I thought it more appropriate to post it here)
Even though the internal architecture of the CPU might be harvard-like, with separate instruction and data caches and buses, the rest of the SoC still only has got one main memory, and both instruction and data buses connect to the same memory. From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARM9:
From the linked page about modified Harvard architecture:
The same also goes for any modern x86 chip.
This doesn't pose any issue for Raspbian, which is just a special recompile of normal Debian for Raspberry Pis; the main difference in raspbian is that it has got a different arm target (armv6+vfp hardfloat) than the other existing arm debian distributions (which target either armv4t or armv7+vfp hardfloat).