[dragontamer]

In Zen1, the "remote L3" caches had longer read/write times than DDR4.

Think of the MESI messages that must happen before you can talk to a remote L3 cache:

1. Core#0 tries to talk to L3 cache associated with Core#17.

2. Core#17 has to evict data from L1 and L2, ensuring that its L3 cache is in fact up to date. During this time, Core#0 is stalled (or working on its hyperthread instead).

3. Once done, then Core#17's L3 cache can send the data to Core#0's L3 cache.

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In contrast, step#2 doesn't happen with raw DDR4 (no core owns the data).

This fact doesn't change with the new "star" architecture of Zen2 or Zen3. The I/O die just makes it a bit more efficient. I'd still expect remote L3 communications to be as slow, or slower, than DDR4.