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A comment on Intel Lines Up ThunderX ARM Against Xeons. Parent comment

Re:Intel Lines Up ThunderX ARM Against Xeons by gpderetta on Thursday June 02, 2016 @06:18AM (#11821415)
Possibly the article is worded imprecisely. NUMA by itself is not the desirable property. What you want is multisocket scaling, NUMA is just a way to get there.

Certainly for 2 and 4 sockets Intel uncore (i.e. the connecting fabric) is state of the art and has been for a while (but not 2 decades).

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Re:Intel Lines Up ThunderX ARM Against Xeons by ThenAsNow on Thursday June 02, 2016 @11:26AM (#11823219)
I agree it's a nit, and your interpretation is probably on the right track, but it's an inaccurate statement by the original author as-written.

Also agree that the crux of the point is multisocket scaling. Though with enough sockets (if memory serves, in mid-2000s, the rough consensus was 4), I don't think computer architects think there is any way to scale well without a NUMA approach of some kind, so it's not just an academic point. With today's memory bandwidth and "memory transaction volume", perhaps even 2 sockets wouldn't scale well in a uniform memory access configuration.

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