Comment by kragen
10 hours ago
That's not software transactional memory, it's hardware transactional memory, and their design was not a good one.
10 hours ago
That's not software transactional memory, it's hardware transactional memory, and their design was not a good one.
Well, HTM was not useful per se, except accelerating an STM implementation.
It isn't very useful for that, but you can use it to implement other higher-level concurrency primitives like multi-word compare and swap efficiently.
True. At some point in the now distant past, AMD had a proposal for a very restricted form of HTM that allowed CAS up to 7 memory locations as they had some very specific linked list algorithms that they wanted optimize and the 7 location restrictions worked well with the number of ways of their memory.
Nothing came out of it unfortunately.
3 replies →