Wednesday, February 15, 2012

Haswell TSX

One of the significant research areas of the last decade has been "transactional memory", which in concept involves the use of DBMS transaction paradigms (the "ACID" mnemonic: Atomic Consistent Isolated and Durable actions) in the microprocessor's memory model.

Slowly, that work has been emerging from the lab and into viability.

There's a lot of interest in Intel's recently announced TSX extensions for their new Haswell processor architecture, described in Transactional Synchronization in Haswell.

And here are two additional perspectives:

This work is going to take a long time to evolve: it's complicated and not easy to use.

But as Moore's Law continues to grind to a halt, and multi-code programming continues to expand, this sort of technique is the way of the future.

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