Performance Guidelines for AMD Athlon™ and AMD Opteron™ ccNUMA Multiprocessor Systems

The AMD Athlon™ 64 and AMD Opteron™ family of single-core and dual-core multiprocessor systems are based on the cache coherent Non-Uniform Memory Access (ccNUMA) architecture. In this architecture, each processor has access to its own low-latency, local memory (through the processor’s on-die local memory controller), as well as to higher latency remote memory through the on-die memory controllers of the other processors in the multiprocessor environment. At the same time, the ccNUMA architecture is designed to maintain the cache coherence of the entire shared memory space. The high-performance coherent HyperTransport™ technology interconnects between processors in the multiprocessor system permit remote memory access and cache coherence.