Node Memory Interleave

Common Options : Enabled, Disabled

Quick Review

To ensure balanced performance from all nodes or processor cores in a ccNUMA (Cache-Coherent Non-Uniform Memory Access) system, the system memory can interleaved across all nodes or processor cores in blocks of 4 KB. This means every node or processor core will access a combination of local and remote memory.

This ensures a perfect balance in fast and slow memory accesses for all nodes or processor cores. Therefore, this is great for multi-threaded applications that are not optimized for ccNUMA, but works poorly with single-threaded applications.

This BIOS feature determines whether system memory should be interleaved between all nodes or processor cores.

When enabled, all system memory will be interleaved between all nodes or processor cores in blocks of 4KB. This ensures fair access for all nodes or processor cores to the system memory, at the expense of the maximum performance of any one node or processor core.

You should enable this feature if you are using an operating system (e.g. Windows 2000, Windows 98) and multi-threaded applications that are not ccNUMA-optimized. This improves your system's overall performance.

When disabled, system memory will not be interleaved between the nodes or processor cores. The performance of all nodes or processor cores will be imbalanced, favouring one node or processor core over the other(s).

You should disable this feature if you run predominantly single-threaded applications. This allows for better single-threaded performance.

You should also disable this feature if you are using ccNUMA-aware operating system like Windows XP SP2 and Windows Server 2003. For such operating systems, you should enable the ACPI SRAT Table BIOS feature instead.

Please note that you must disable Node Memory Interleave if you intend to enable the ACPI SRAT Table feature. Node Memory Interleave is a static optimization that cannot work in tandem with the dynamic optimizations that the operating system can perform using information from the ACPI SRAT.

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