[jamesaguilar]

I'm not familiar with this research, but it's possible that sequential accesses to memory would lead to prefetching, in which case going half-local half-remote could actually lead to a slowdown versus all-remote. Another hypothesis is if the memory ends up having to be migrated from one cpu cache to the other, then back. It's better if it's always in the remote cache than if it's getting flipped between the two.

I'm pretty sure it goes without saying that 100% local is always better, assuming you're not trading anything else away (like accessible CPU on other nodes).

[mtdewcmu]

Ah. So a remote access may be coming directly from the cache of a different CPU? That's something I didn't consider, and definitely adds another wrinkle.

I sense that the article is saying things in confusing ways, perhaps because that's the way computer architects speak (it always struck me as counterintuitive and confusing to measure a cache by its miss rate rather than its hit rate) or maybe it's this article.