Advantages And Disadvantages Of Von Neumann Architecture

Having been used as a kind of main part of the computer for decades, Neumann architecture has widely observable impacts on today’s computers. Until von Neumann created his architecture, each computing machine was designed and built for a single predetermined purpose like desk calculators that can do only simple mathematics. Moreover, up to that time, the computers were “programmed” by rebuilding the entire machine to carry out a different task. For example, the early computer called ENIAC took three weeks to re-wire in order to do different calculation. In fact, the first computers had to be redesigned much more than programmed. “Reprogramming” was a manual process, if possible. It started with flow charts and calculations and continued with detailed engineering designs.

The shared bus between the program memory and data memory leads to the von Neumann bottleneck, the limited throughput (data transfer rate) between the central processing unit (CPU) and memory compared to the amount of memory. Because the single bus can only access one of the two classes of memory at a time, throughput is lower than the rate at which the CPU can work. This seriously limits the effective processing speed when the CPU is required to perform minimal processing on large amounts of data. Aside from the von Neumann bottleneck, program modifications can be quite harmful, either by accident or design. In some simple stored-program computer designs, programs that did not work properly could damage itself, other programs, or the operating system and result in possible crashes. A buffer overflow is an example that can be given to programs that do not work properly. The ability of programs to create other programs or modify existing ones is also often used by malicious programs. Such malicious programs can break down stacks, overwrite existing programs, and then can damage the computer by modifying other program