Windows 2008 R2 - Groups, Processors, Sockets, Cores Threads, NUMA nodes what is all this?

Industry Standard Architecture (ISA) technologies have progressed extremely rapidly in the last 10 years.  Both Intel and AMD based systems are dramatically different than even just 5-6 years ago.  Ten years ago servers usually had either 2 or 4 physical processors plugged into sockets on the server motherboard.  The typical memory installed in these systems was 1-2GB, with very few ISA based systems supporting 8 or more processors.   The Windows operating system displayed each CPU as one bar in Windows Task Manager. The machine architecture also was very simple with each processor having the same access latency to memory and other resources.

Today ISA servers have increased exponentially in processing capacity to be on par with high cost proprietary UNIX system and complexity.  These developments and the associated terminology tends sometimes to confuse people a little.  The implications for software licensing of the Windows operating system and SQL database is sometimes unclear.

Today SAP on Win/SQL customers routinely run on servers with 8 processors, 128 logical processors and 512 GB of RAM is nothing unusual. Even on 4 processor commodity Intel servers such as the HP DL 580 G7 we have customers with 512GB RAM.  Typical 2 CPU servers are now configured with 128GB of RAM and have 24 logical processors.  Let's go through some terms:

Processor

Sometimes referred to as "CPU" or "Socket".  This is the packaged physical piece of silicon that contains all the cores and required shared components.  The CPU is the package of components that needs to be put in the processor socket on the motherboard. Besides the multiple cores which are contained on each processor, the current generation of processors by AMD and Intel contains the Memory Controller and the bus to external memory which is administrated by this one processor. In the Windows and SQL Server space, we use the term socket or processor side by side also due to Microsoft's per socket or per processor licensing.

Read more: Running SAP Applications on SQL Server

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