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The limited throughput between the CPU and memory.

The amount of work that a CPU can get done in the time that it takes to retrieve a piece of information from memory is increasing. As this increases, the amount of time a CPU spends waiting for data to be fetched from memory (i.e. "doing nothing") outpaces the amount of time the CPU spends doing actual work. Thus, a faster CPU no longer translates to a faster computer - the limiting part ("bottleneck") of the computer becomes the throughut (bandwidth and latency) between the CPU and memory. This is the "Von Neumann Bottleneck".

It is called the "Von Neumann" bottleneck because it's a potential bottleneck on computers that use "von neumann architecture" (see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Von_neumann_architecture ), which is pretty much every general purpose computer in existence today.

The concept of the "Von Nuemann Bottleneck" has been receiving increased attention lately, as many people feel that it is becoming a problem that will only be overcome with fundamental design changes in computer and/or CPU architecure.

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13y ago

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