The von Neumann computer model on the mirror of new technologies

The today computers, as taught in the elementary computer architecture courses, are based essentially on the principles, suggested by von Neumann in a 1946 report. Since that, only minor improvements have been carried out, although the impressive technical developments seem to hide this fact. In the meantime, also a whole software industry has grown up, and masses of society are using computers, sometimes in quite unexpected places. After several decades of developments, the architecture suggested by Neumann (and its consequences) is heavily criticized. Most people are hoping some kind of solution from reconfigurable computing (RC). The present paper attempts to review in the light of the technical background and recent developments, how much of the original assumptions are still valid and also suggests some alternative ideas for improving the widely used computer architectures using RC, to make them more effective. The ideas suggested here are ”patches” to the single-processor architecture, and considerable speed gain is expected from those architectural changes in a multi-tasking execution environment.