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Intel has released additional information regarding the Transactional Synchronization technology (TSX) inside their upcoming Haswell processor; it's basically an instruction set architecture (ISA) extension to make hardware accelerated transactional memory possible. What does that mean in the real world? The more cores you get in a system, the more threads you need to keep them busy. Unfortunately, it's not that easy to simply add more threads, as a lot of software scales pretty badly as core count goes up. Even server and HPC software have trouble dealing with the current octal and dodeca cores.


Intel's TSX holds the promise that it can make it easier for developers to produce code that scales well with higher core counts. Even better, code should be easier to debug and get a nice performance boost with minimal effort. In this article we explain how TSX works and how it may enable much better scaling even in legacy software.






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