Lesson 040
Von Neumann Architecture
Stored Program · Four Parts · The Bottleneck
1:00The stored-program design that underlies nearly every computer — four components, a shared bus, the fetch-decode-execute cycle, and the bottleneck it creates.
By the end, you can
- Explain the stored-program concept and why it replaced physical rewiring.
- Name the four von Neumann components and describe the role of each.
- Identify the function of the CU, ALU, PC, MAR, MDR, IR, and ACC.
- Trace the fetch-decode-execute-store cycle step by step, including all register transfers.
- Explain the von Neumann bottleneck and correctly attribute its cause to the shared bus, not slow RAM.
- Describe how the modified Harvard design (split caches) alleviates the bottleneck while preserving a unified main memory.
- Distinguish pure von Neumann from modified Harvard at both the cache and main-memory level.
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