You will want to examine everything associated with DPDK.... the Intel Dataplane Development Kit
They are working with not just 10gig cards but also 40gig cards
http://www.dpdk.org/here is a paper on 40gig performance on off the shelf hardware...
http://perso.telecom-paristech.fr/~dros ... echrep.pdfNow to the specifics....
DPDK's threading model is one thread per core where the core is exempted from the OS's scheduler.
Threads are run-to-completion and avoid OS syscalls...
In general practice, a whole core - A WHOLE CORE - is dedicated to *** just reading*** the hardware rings on the NICs connected to it...
Another whole core is dedicated to *** just writing *** to the hardware rings of NICs connected to it...
The DPDK software is very cache aware and the data structures in it are tuned to be cache line aligned.
Now towards your NUMA issues....
DPDK takes into account - via mapping Huge Page memory (also not under OS memory manager control) to physical addresses, finding contiguous pages and ***noting which physical memory is connected to what physical SOCKET****
This allows DPDK to allocate memory to a ring buffer and packet buffer which will be accessed by core 3 on socket 0 and be assured that this memory is physically connected to socket 0.
This reduces substantially the NUMA hit your team members are concerned about.... but it is a software problem... not a hardware one.
ultimately the argument about why your second unconnected processor may lag in performance is a question about just what software you run on it....
For example...
socket 0 cores 0 - 8 -- run networking code and filtering algorithms
socket 1 cores 9 - 15 -- run the OS and a database application which consumes filtered events
the lag is one way from socket 0 (the network) to socket 1 (the database)
If the database has to communicate at wire speed - it would be better to have some of it running on socket 0.
So... please check out DPDK, and go ask your team just what applications this hardware is supposedly designed for..... Although I find it hard to believe the second socket doesn't have it's own PCI-x connections....
Good luck and cheers!