alt Hacker NewsUltimately I think we will go to full NUMA like Sun and others tried. Instead of having L4 and then L5 caches, each core simply has 4GB of local working memory and you use programming languages that are ready for this. Erlang would be easy, and I think Rust has the semantics to make it work but it might take years of compiler advancement to make it efficient.
All shared state is communicated through shared memory pool that is either accessed directly through segregated address ranges or via DMA.
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Honestly, i doubt it. That exposes many details to the programmers that many of them would prefer not to know.
The higher level the language, the less interest there is to manually manage memory. It is just something to offload to the gc/runtime/etc.
So, i think this is a no-go. The market wont accept it.
NUMA has a huge amount of overhead (e.g. in terms of intercore latency), and NUMA server CPUs cost a lot more than single socket boards. If you look at the servers at Google or Facebook they will have some NUMA servers for certain workloads that actually need them, but most most servers will be single socket because they're cheaper and applications literally run faster on them. It's a win win if you can fit your workload on a single socket server so there is a lot of motivation to make applications work in a non-NUMA way if at all possible.