OSNews

Hmmm... you'll be posting a lot on this website if links to links annoy you!

A more interesting article that could have been linked directly as it is already available is at

http://research.sun.com/spotlight/2007/2007-08-13_transactional_mem...

on transactional memory. This follows the announcement mid-week that their Rock processor will provide hardware support for transactional memory.

Rock will support transactional memory? That is really great news. Something like transactional memory is the best chance to make the power of massively multicore CPUs available to mere mortals.

Unfortunately like most technology its going to take software companies years before they utilise the featuers; I mean, look how long it took them to move to 32bit, heck, Window Vista was in beta for 5 years and there are software titles still not compatible with it.

Unfortunately that is the one problem with the IT world - more concerned about private jets and perks of the job rather than investing the money in the long term health of the company.

As I understand it, a lot of work is being done in the compiler and the underlying OS to make HTM support *transparent* to the application and userbase.

This isn't something that's just been thought of recently, it's been in the works (skunkworks, of course!) for years

http://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&lr=&q=hybrid+transa...

did you read the link? It clearly states how much effort over how many years Sun have been working on TM. Marc Tremblay (look him up) gave a keynote at PODC2007 highlighting the benefits already achievable in Rock using TM.

Something to keep an eye on....