What is the von Neumann structure?

The Von Neumann structure is a basic architecture of computer architecture. It was proposed by von Neumann in the 1940s. This structure is widely used in modern computers, including personal computers. , servers, supercomputers, etc. It provides an important framework for computer design and implementation. Although it has some limitations, it is still widely used in modern computers and is an important foundation for computer science research and development.

# Operating system for this tutorial: Windows 10 system, Dell G3 computer.

The Von Neumann architecture is a basic architecture of computer architecture, which was proposed by John von Neumann in the 1940s. This structure is widely used in modern computers, including personal computers, servers, supercomputers, and so on.

The core idea of ​​the von Neumann architecture is to divide the computer's functions into control units and storage units, and connect the two through a data bus. The control unit is responsible for commanding and coordinating the various components of the computer, controlling their operation, and executing instructions. The storage unit is used to store instructions and data.

In the von Neumann architecture, the computer's instructions and data are stored in binary form in memory and accessed through addresses. The control unit fetches instructions from memory and decodes them for execution. The results of the instruction execution can be stored back in memory or transferred to other components via the data bus.

The main features of the von Neumann structure are as follows:

Stored program: Instructions and data are stored in the memory in the same way, and the computer can execute the instructions in the memory in sequence. This way of storing programs makes the computer flexible and programmable, and can execute different programs according to different needs.

Sequential execution: The computer executes instructions one after another in the order they are executed, one instruction at a time. This sequential execution method makes the computer controllable and predictable, ensuring the correctness and reliability of the program.

Separation of memory and arithmetic unit: The memory and arithmetic unit are separated. The memory is used to store instructions and data, and the arithmetic unit is used to perform calculations and logical operations. This separation method makes the computer highly modular and scalable, and each module can be flexibly combined and expanded as needed.

Single instruction stream, single data stream: execute one instruction at a time, and only operate one set of data at a time. This single instruction stream and single data stream method makes the computer simple and easy to understand, and can easily perform instruction-level parallelism and data-level parallelism.

The advantages of the von Neumann structure are its simplicity, flexibility and scalability. It modularizes the core functions of the computer and connects them through a data bus so that the various components of the computer can communicate and collaborate with each other. This modularization and communication method makes the computer highly configurable and scalable, and can be flexibly combined and expanded according to different needs.

However, the von Neumann structure also has some limitations. For example, data transmission between the memory and the arithmetic unit needs to pass through the data bus, which will lead to bandwidth limitations of data transmission and affect the running speed of the computer. In addition, since the memory and the arithmetic unit are separated, the access speed of the memory is slower than that of the arithmetic unit, which may lead to a bottleneck of memory access. In order to solve these problems, people have proposed some improved computer architectures, such as multi-level cache, pipeline, superscalar, etc.

In general, the von Neumann structure is the basis of computer architecture, which provides an important framework for the design and implementation of computers. Although it has some limitations, it is still widely used in modern computers and is an important foundation for computer science research and development.

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