Fun with Hardware Transactional Memory

Leading hardware vendors such as Intel and IBM are releasing a new generation of processor architectures that provide hardware transactional memory (HTM), a synchronization mechanisms for fast in-memory transactions. This talk will argue that HTM is not just a faster way of doing the same old latches and monitors. Instead, it could bring about a fundamental positive change in the way we program multicores (and eventually perhaps even databases) by allowing a fundamental rethinking of basic synchronization structures such as locks, memory management, and a range of concurrent data structures.