von Neumann architecture

Definitions

1. The computer architecture in which a single memory store holds both program instructions and data, with a central processing unit that fetches, decodes, and executes instructions sequentially. Virtually every general-purpose computer built since 1945 follows this model, though the 'von Neumann bottleneck' — the bandwidth limit between CPU and memory — remains a fundamental constraint.

   In plain English: The basic design of almost every computer: programs and data share the same memory, and the processor works through instructions one at a time.

   Example: GPUs were designed partly to bypass the von Neumann bottleneck by processing massive amounts of data in parallel.

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