AMD athlon 64 User Manual

Page of 48
Chapter 3
Analysis and Recommendations
21
Performance Guidelines for AMD Athlon™ 64 and AMD Opteron™
ccNUMA Multiprocessor Systems
40555
Rev. 3.00
June 2006
distance. If they are indirectly connected to each other in a 4P configuration, it is considered as a 
2 hop access distance.
The following example—extracted from mining the results of the synthetic test case—substantiates 
the recommendation to keep data local.
In this test, a single thread ran on node 0 (core 0) on an otherwise idle system and each of the 
following cases were measured and compared:
Thread accessed data locally from node 0
Thread accessed data one hop away from node 1
Thread accessed data one hop away from node 2
Thread accessed data two hops away from node 3
As seen in Figure 4 and Figure 5 on page 22, as the hop distance increases, access times increase for 
both reads and writes. 
Figure 4.
Read-Only Thread Running on Node 0, Accessing Data from 0, 1 and 2 
Hops Away on an Idle System
 
Time for read
100%
108%
109%
130%
0
0.2
0.4
0.6
0.8
1
1.2
1.4
1.6
1.8
0.0.r.0
0.0.r.1
0.0.r.2
0.0.r.3
0  Hop
1  Hop
1  Hop
2 Hop