In Linux kernel, the documentation for CONFIG_NUMA says:

Enable NUMA (Non Uniform Memory Access) support. he kernel will try to allocate memory used by a CPU on the local memory controller of the CPU and add some more NUMA awareness to the kernel. For 64-bit this is recommended if the system is Intel Core i7 (or later), AMD Opteron, or EM64T NUMA. 

I have an Intel Core i7 processor, but AFAICT it only has one NUMA node:

$ numactl --hardware available: 1 nodes (0) node 0 cpus: 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 node 0 size: 16063 MB node 0 free: 15031 MB node distances: node 0 0: 10 

So what is the purpose of having CONFIG_NUMA=y, when i7 has only one NUMA node ?