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Some ARM cores like the ARM9 family of cores have a Harvard Architecture, at least at the cache level. That is they access two seperate caches, an I-cache for instructions and a D-cache for data ( example ARM926EJ-S ).

However the I & D caches wind up being interfaced to plain vanilla SDRAM externally. So it seems that at the RAM level we are back to the von Neumann design where one store ( SDRAM ) holds instructions >and< data.

In the example designs I've seen there seems to be just one single bus interfacing the SDRAM to the SOC chip.

How are the instructions and data differentiated, sorted and routed from the combined bus interfacing the external SDRAM to the internal I and D caches?

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The control logic records why it issued a particular fetch to a particular address, so it can do something sensible with the result. There will be a small queue of outstanding fetches (remember, fetching from DRAM may take hundreds of cycles). On a value arriving, it's written back to the part of the architecture that requested it, and the relevant part of the processor's pipeline is un-stalled.

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the L1 cache is often in the arm core, sram, very fast, L2 might be off chip might not.

The real answer to your question is go to infocenter.arm.com then go to the AMBA link on the left side then download one of the AMBA or AXI specs, even the oldest one there AMBA2 is okay.

Inside the core if there is an L1 cache the processor knows if a memory access is an instruction fetch or data, and that information is put on the internal bus and if the cache is enabled it will look up that result before going to the edge of the core. the edge of the core is some flavor of amba, ahb, or axi bus which has as one of the bits on the bus an access type which includes among other things cacheable or not. So whatever is glued onto that, in particular if the vendor has purchased L2 cache logic from arm to glue onto this core, that L2 logic will, using the items on the bus, look for and possibly return the result to the core. Otherwise goto main memory on the other side of the l2 cache (also an amba/axi/whatever bus) to resolve the transaction or evict something needed to complete the transaction, etc.

The differences in flavors of ARM busses or versions, can/will provide more or less information depending on the bus details. But if the system is capable of having a cache the transaction will indicate cacheable or not and indicate in some way instruction from data (if that cache can separate the two L1 might be able to and L2 might not for example L1 to some extent drives what is in L2)

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  • \$\begingroup\$ the arm busses are harvard in the sense that the same address and data bus are used but the many other fields on the bus are used to distinguish one access type from another (there are many more than 2) so in that sense you have separate I and D transactions even though they all share the same bus. \$\endgroup\$
    – old_timer
    Jan 8, 2013 at 4:52
  • \$\begingroup\$ they are not harvard in the sense that you can perform data writes to ram and then branch to that ram and execute the data you just wrote (the address spaces are not separate). \$\endgroup\$
    – old_timer
    Jan 8, 2013 at 4:53
  • \$\begingroup\$ Technically, one cannot just branch to that RAM. The instruction cache is not guaranteed to be coherent. For most implementations of RISC ISAs, any separate instruction cache is not coherent and software must explicitly invalidate the appropriate cache blocks. Even with a coherent or shared cache, a RISC will generally require a pipeline synchronization or similar operation since the store may be processed in the back-end of the pipeline after the branch is encountered in the front-end. x86 is odd in supporting aggressive coherence and consistency w.r.t. self-modifying code. \$\endgroup\$
    – user15426
    Jan 8, 2013 at 12:49
  • \$\begingroup\$ If the i-cache is on sure, and you dont flush it. If you are making a bootloader or operating system you generally handle that. point being the code and data are in the same address space on the same bus which contradicts harvard architecture. \$\endgroup\$
    – old_timer
    Jan 8, 2013 at 14:58

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