The NUMA NUMA [Song] Tax

October 1, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan

When you have a wafer of chips, at least in theory all of the transistors cost the same on the wafer. But sometimes, when transistors perform certain functions, they are worth more. And in some cases, such as the electronics that enable the coupling of multiple cores on a die across a shared L3 cache or that allow the ganging up of processors across multiple sockets that allows for larger and shared main memory for applications to run in, those circuits are worth a lot more.

This lashing together of compute components across shared memories – Non-Uniform Cache Access, or …