Von Neumann Architecture

The term Von Neumann architecture, also known as the Von Neumann model or the Princeton architecture, derives from a 1945 computer architecture proposal by the mathematician and early computer scientist John von Neumann and others, First Draft of a Report on the EDVAC. This describes a design architecture for an electronic digital computer with subdivisions of a processing unit consisting of an arithmetic logic unit and processor registers, a control unit containing an instruction register and program counter, a memory to store both data and instructions, external mass storage, and input and output mechanisms. The meaning of the term has evolved to mean a stored-program computer in which an instruction fetch and a data operation cannot occur at the same time because they share a common bus. This is referred to as the Von Neumann bottleneck and often limits the performance of the system.

The design of a Von Neumann architecture is simpler than the more modern Harvard architecture which is also a stored-program system but has one dedicated set of address and data buses for memory, and another set of address and data buses for fetching instructions.

A stored-program digital computer is one that keeps its programmed instructions, as well as its data, in read-write, random-access memory (RAM). Stored-program computers were an advancement over the program-controlled computers of the 1940s, such as the Colossus and the ENIAC, which were programmed by setting switches and inserting patch leads to route data and to control signals between various functional units. In the vast majority of modern computers, the same memory is used for both data and program instructions.