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Department of Computer Science and Engineering
University of Washington

The von Neumann Type Architecture

By far the most well-known type architecture is the von Neumann machine. The components of the von Neumann machine are a large, random access memory and a processor consisting of a functional unit that can compute some set of simple functions, a small amount of state, often referred to as a program counter (PC), and a controller that orchestrates the operation of the machine. These components are illustrated on the left side of Figure \ref{fig:hybrid_TA}. A von Neumann machine runs by repeatedly fetching the instruction indicated by the PC from memory, fetching operands from memory as dictated by the instruction, computing some function, then updating the PC and storing results back to memory, if necessary. The only cost that is relevant to the von Neumann machine is that each instruction execution carries unit cost. Alternatively, each memory reference could have unit cost; however, abstractly these cost models are equivalent.

Parallel RAM

CTA

UW Embedded Research Group
Last modified: Wed Jun 7 16:38:57 PDT 2006