The Von Neumann Trap: Why Computing Architecture Refuses to Evolve

Despite nearly 50 years of attempts to address the Von Neumann bottleneck, every modern CPU still relies on the same fundamental design. The real story isn't that we couldn't replace it—it's that workarounds became so efficient (caching, prefetching, speculative execution) that replacement became economically irrational. Legacy software ecosystems create such high switching costs that even demonstrably better alternatives, like phase-change memory, fail to gain adoption, making architectural stagnation a feature of technological maturity rather than a failure of innovation.