Introduction to sequential computer architecture

Sequential computer architectures are a class of computing systems where instructions and operations are executed one after the other, in a sequential order.

These models are characterized by a single processing unit (CPU) that carries out instructions in a linear fashion, one at a time.

Sequential computer models contrast with parallel computing models, where multiple processing units work simultaneously to perform tasks. 

The Von Neumann Architecture is a classic example of Sequential Architecture.

Execution Flow

In a sequential computer model, instructions are executed in a linear sequence, one at a time.

The CPU follows a fetch-decode-execute cycle: it fetches an instruction from memory, decodes it to determine the operation to perform, executes the operation, and stores the result back in memory if necessary.

This sequential execution means that each instruction depends on the completion of the previous one, which can lead to a bottleneck in performance for certain tasks.

Advantages

• Conceptually simpler and easier to program compared to parallel models or multi-agent models.
  
• Well-suited for tasks that do not require concurrent processing or where the dependencies between instructions are straightforward.

Disadvantages

• May suffer from performance limitations for computationally intensive or time-critical tasks since they do not take full advantage of modern multi-core processors.
• They may not be efficient for handling large-scale data processing tasks where parallelism could significantly speed up computations.