Right. And yet people stopped doing that when 512 bit wide cache lines pulling at 30-60MHz became the norm. The interconnect just wasn't fast enough, and everything moved onto a single board and stayed there. For almost 20 years the best we've been able to do are things like Infiniband that are far slower than on-board DRAM.

Now (apparently) there's a new interconnect that can do the job. That's news, not "same old boring stuff".

> For almost 20 years the best we've been able to do are things like Infiniband that are far slower than on-board DRAM

The SGI shared-memory big iron machines (Origin & Altix) are more recent and can have memory-only nodes. The most recent NUMA Altix was launched in 2009, I'm not sure if the later machines managed to keep the Origin 2k era goal of having as much remote memory bandwidth as local.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NUMAlink

What do you mean right? You said this is different, I pointed out that it is literally exactly the same. That is not agreement.

The rest of your post is simply factually incorrect. People did not stop doing that, such systems continued to exist through the 90s and 2000s. They still exist right now. They became less common, but that had nothing to do with "the interconnect just wasn't fast enough". It was because intel CPUs became the fastest available, and racks full of small intel based systems were (and are) massively cheaper and entirely sufficient for the vast majority of uses. The speed of interconnect fabric kept up just fine.