Transactional Memory Coming to Haswell

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Over at Real World Technologies, David Kanter writes that Transactional Memory is coming to Intel’s pending Haswell microarchitecture, which is good news for multicore programmers.

Transactional memory is a software technique that simplifies writing concurrent programs. TM draws on concepts first developed and established in the database community, which has been dealing with concurrency for roughly 30 years. The idea is to declare a region of code as a transaction. A transaction executes and atomically commits all the results to memory (when the transaction succeeds) or aborts and cancels all the results (if the transaction fails). The key for TM is to provide the Atomicity, Consistency and Isolation qualities that make databases and SQL accessible to ordinary developers. These transactions can safely execute in parallel, which replaces existing painful and bug-prone techniques such as locks and semaphores. There is also a potential performance benefit. Locks are pessimistic and assume that the locking thread will write to the data, so the progress of other threads is blocked. Two transactions which access locked value can proceed in parallel, and a rollback only occurs if one of the transactions writes to the data.

Fans of Sun Microsystems may recall that Transactional Memory was to be included in the company’s ROCK processor, a project that was eventually shelved in 2009. Read the Full Story or check out Kanter’s recent deep dive feature on Haswell.

Comments

  1. Including a link to the article at Real World Tech would be nice. All you have here are links to Wikipedia.