US Patent 8041915 Faster memory access in non-unified memory access systems

A generic NUMA-compliant memory selection technique is provided to enable a device capable of accessing memory anywhere in a system to select a near (potentially the nearest) memory for use with the device. For example, an AGP controller can access system memory anywhere within a multiprocessing node system, but will operate more efficiently, and interfere less with other data transactions, if it locates the closest memory, determines the memory addresses corresponding to the closest memory, and locks (or otherwise allocates) memory addresses for AGP functionality within the range of determined addresses in the near memory.