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