Impact of Von Neumann architecture in comp.

Computer architecture is the the art of assembling logical elements into a computing device; the specification of the relation between parts of a computer system(wordnetweb). It gives us the structure of a computer design and explains us about the organisation of computers hardware and software. It tells us about the different parts of a computer, and how they are assembled in a computer with the help of controls and logic gates and circuits. If you are to discuss about the computer architecture, then the Von Neumann Architecture cannot be missed out. Von Neumann was an American mathematician who published his computer architecture design in 1945. The Von Neumann Architecture is derived from this design. It is safe to say that Von Neumann Architecture has been used practically in every computer that has been ever built since the wake of computer technology, as a baseline. In this architecture, a computer consists of a central processing unit(CPU) which contains a control unit which further contains register such as PC(program counter),IR(instruction register)etc.; an arithmetic logical unit; processor registers such as accumulator; a memory unit which has read/write operation commonly RAM(random access memory); I/O units and serial communication interfaces such as receiver interface and terminal interface. The ALU performs all the logical and arithmetic operations such as ADD, SUBTRACT, DIVIDE, MULTIPLY, OR, AND etc. The control unit consists of IR, SC(sequence counter), Decoders etc. The instruction is read from the memory with the help of a BUS and it is placed in the IR, from there it is decoded and controls signals are transmitted accordingly and the best course of action is then selected. The system bus can be described as something which transfers the data from one part of the computer to other, how the data is sent and received in the computer. The Von Neumann architecture involves using a system bus to get information from
memory to the processor and back and to carry information to and from I/O devices (Anderson, Ferro, Hilton, 2010, Pg. 117). The connection of bus is such that the system bus connects the

Central processing unit to the main memory unit(usually RAM) and the Input/Output bus connects input/output devices with other devices and CPU. The register files contains other general purpose register which comes into use. The register filer is in also in CPU.

The Von Neumann Architecture uses the stored-program system. This means that the instruction fetch and the operation on data or data processing cannot occur at the same time. The reason being that they share the same bus. This is known as Von Neumann Bottleneck. In this all the data and all instruction pass through the same bus to get in or out of the processor, hence the processor has to wait for the required action untill it gets access to this bus and in turn processor gets famished for the instructions or data. As a result processor is unable to maintain its speed and instead of doing its work, it has to wait idle. The most effective thing which has been done in order to minimise this effect is the use of independent instructions and data L1 caches. This allows the block of frequently needed instruction and data to be stored in discrete units of memories and very high speed memories and made available to the processor on different independent buses. As a result the instructions would not have to wait for data and vice-versa.

But even with this approach the bottleneck still betide on the main bus when less frequently used instructions or data is accessed, or basically instruction/data that is not stored in cache is accessed. Therefore at the last ,it is safe to say that almost in any architecture used in computer systems, we can always find von neuman architecture in its basis.