System architecture styles

When designing your programs, it's important to note that there are a number of different memory architecture styles that suit the needs of a range of different use cases. One style of memory architecture could be excellent for parallel computing tasks and scientific computing, but somewhat cumbersome when it comes to your standard home-computing tasks.

When we categorize these different styles, we tend to follow a taxonomy first proposed by a man named Michael Flynn in 1972. This taxonomy defines four different styles of computer architecture. These are:

• SISD: single instruction stream, single data stream
• SIMD: single instruction stream, multiple data stream
• MISD: multiple instruction stream, single data stream
• MIMD: multiple instruction stream, multiple data stream

We will look in more detail at these architectures in the following sections.