What Is the Von Neumann Architecture?

The von Neumann structure, also known as the Princeton structure, is a memory structure that combines program instruction memory and data memory. The program instruction storage address and data storage address point to different physical locations of the same memory, so the program instructions and data have the same width. For example, the program instructions and data of the Intel 8086 CPU are 16 bits wide.

Before the birth of computers, people had a bottleneck in the accuracy and quantity of calculations. The demand for machines such as computers was very strong. Von Neumann's logic and computer ideas guided him to design and manufacture the first machine in history. General electronic computer. His computer theory is mainly influenced by his own mathematical foundation, and has highly mathematical and logical characteristics. For this theory, he is generally called "the logic theory of computers". And his idea of computer stored procedures is another great innovation of his, through internal

The von Neumann structure opened the precedent for the development of computer system structures, but because of its centralized and sequential control, it became a bottleneck for improving performance. Therefore, scientists from various countries are still exploring various non-von Neumann structures, such as data Stream computers, functional programming language computers, etc. are all relatively well-known non-von Neumann structures. ^[4]

In recent years, people have strived to break through the limitations of the traditional von Neumann system. The research on various types of non-Neumannized computers has mushroomed, mainly in the following four aspects:

(1) The traditional von Neumann machine is improved. For example, in the traditional system computer, only one processing component is executed in series, and it is changed to a multi-processing component to form a stream processing. The processing efficiency is improved by relying on time overlap.

(2) The system is composed of multiple processors to form a multi-instruction stream and a multi-data stream supporting a parallel algorithm structure. Research in this area has achieved some success.

(3) Negative control flow driving method of von Neumann machine. A data flow computer designed to work in a data flow-driven manner. As long as the data is ready, the relevant instructions can be executed in parallel. This is a truly non-Neumanized computer. Such research is still ongoing and has achieved periodic results, such as neural computers.

(4) Get out of the category of electrons completely and use other substances as information carriers and execution components, such as photons, biomolecules, quantum, etc. Numerous scientists are conducting these forward-looking studies. ^[3]