Intel’s Future Haswell Processor to Feature Transactional Synchronization

Intel’s James Reinders writes that the company will be introducing new Transactional Synchronization Extensions (TSX) for the future 22 nm multicore processor code-named “Haswell”. In a nutshell, Intel TSX provides a set of instruction set extensions that allow programmers to specify regions of code for transactional synchronization.

With transactional synchronization, the hardware can determine dynamically whether threads need to serialize through lock-protected critical sections, and perform serialization only when required. This lets the processor expose and exploit concurrency that would otherwise be hidden due to dynamically unnecessary synchronization.

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