Reference Guide

Dell, EMC and other trademarks are trademarks of Dell Inc. or its subsidiaries

• NPS0 – This is only available on a 2-socket system. This means one NUMA node per system.

Memory is interleaved across all 16 memory channels in the system.

• NPS1 – In this, the whole CPU is a single NUMA domain, with all the cores in the socket,

and all the associated memory in this one NUMA domain. Memory is interleaved across the eight

memory channels. All PCIe devices on the socket belong to this single NUMA domain.

• NPS2 – This setting partitions the CPU into 2 NUMA domains, with half the cores and

memory in each domain. Memory is interleaved across 4 memory channels in each NUMA domain.

• NPS4 – This setting partitions the CPU into four NUMA domains. Each quadrant is a NUMA

domain, and memory is interleaved across the 2 memory channels in each quadrant. PCIe devices

will be local to one of the 4 NUMA domains on the socket, depending on the quadrant of the IOD

that has the PCIe root for the device.

Note: Not all CPUs support all NPS settings

Recommended NPS Settings

Depending on the workload type, different NPS settings might give better performance. In general,

NPS1 is the default recommendation for most use cases. Highly parallel workloads like many HPC

use cases might benefit from NPS4. Here is a list of recommended NPS settings for some key

workloads. In some cases, benchmarks are listed to indicate the kind of workloads.

Figure 2 - Table of recommended NPS Settings depending on workload

For additional tuning details, please refer to the Tuning Guides shared by AMD here.

For detailed discussions around the AMD memory architecture, and memory configurations,

please refer to the Balanced Memory Whitepaper