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Subject: Re: Crafty and NUMA

Author: Gian-Carlo Pascutto

Date: 11:07:33 09/03/03

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On September 03, 2003 at 13:29:02, Robert Hyatt wrote:

>>I don't understand.
>>
>>Even the slowest access on a NUMA Opeteron is twice as fast as on a SMP
>>Xeon.
>>
>>How can it be slower then?
>
>You keep changing the subject.

It's my first post in this part of the thread. If this was already
answered elsewhere, 'oops'.

>I am not comparing apples to oranges.  I am
>comparing two machines that are _identical_ in every way except one has a pure
>SMP memory interconnection while the other has a pure NUMA interconnection.
>
>No references to X86 vs Opteron.  No references to Cray vs Sun.  If you give
>me two boxes that are identical except for SMP vs NUMA, the SMP box will
>_always_ have a speed advantage.  It might not be much for small numbers of
>processors, but it _will_ be there.

I don't agree at all. The reason why the Opteron is so fast is (among
others) that it has a Northbridge on chip. This _forces_ it to be NUMA when
there's two or more chips. But it's by definition _faster_ than what it could
be if you would force SMP (and hence, a seperate memory controller that is
not on-chip).

--
GCP



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