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windowsprocessornuma

NUMA - Local memory


Please bear with me, I've just started digging into this whole CPU thing.

The RAM squares shown on the diagram below, what do they refer to? Memory pages? As far as I know, CPUs only have one thing that's related to memory at all - their cache.

So is the RAM on the diagram just a shared cache, or what is it?

NUMA Architecture Diagram


Solution

  • In that diagram, each group of 4 CPUs and their central RAM block is a NUMA node. Cache is inside each CPU so it's not shown in the diagram. So each group of 4 CPUs share a block of fast local RAM.

    Within each node, memory access to local RAM is very fast. Remote access to another node needs to go through the communication network, therefore it is slower - hence NUMA.