Joe Chang thinks about single-socket servers:
There is a mechanism by which we can significantly influence memory latency in a multi-processor (socket) server system, that being memory locality. But few applications actually make use of the NUMA APIs in this regard. Some hypervisors like VMware allow VMs to be created with cores and memory from the same node. What may not be appreciated, however, is that even local node memory on a multi-processor system has significantly higher latency than memory access on a (physical) single-socket system.
That the single processor system has low memory latency was interesting but non-actionable bit of knowledge, until recently. The widespread practice in IT world was to have the 2-way system as the baseline standard. Single socket systems were relegated to small business and turnkey solutions. From long ago to a few years ago, there was a valid basis for this, though the reasons changed over the years. When multi-core processors began to appear, the 2-way became much more powerful than necessary for many secondary applications. But this was also the time virtualization became popular, which gave new reason to continue the 2-way as baseline practice.
Joe points out that for a highly-used transactional system, the lower memory latency might make a single-socket server perform better than a multi-socket server.
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