That's finally
happen! HTM proposal for x86 from AMD!
Main page:
http://developer.amd.com/cpu/ASF/Pages/default.aspx
AMD "Advanced Synchronization Facility" Proposal
The AMD Advanced Synchronization Facility (ASF) is an experimental
instruction set extension for the AMD64 architecture that would
provide new capabilities for efficient synchronization of access to
shared data in highly multithreaded applications as well as operating
system kernels. ASF provides a means for software to inspect and
update multiple shared memory locations atomically without having to
rely on locks for mutual exclusion. It is intended to facilitate lock-
free programming for highly concurrent shared data structures,
allowing more complex and higher performance manipulation of such
structures than is practical with traditional techniques based on
compare-swap instructions such as CMPXCHG16B. ASF code can also
interoperate with lock-based code, or with Software Transactional
Memory.
Some basic usage examples of ASF are provided in the specification.
However, we expect the programming community could readily use the
power and flexibility of ASF to implement very sophisticated, robust
and innovative concurrent data structure algorithms, and we encourage
such experimentation. AMD will be releasing a simulation framework in
the near future to facilitate this.
AMD is releasing this proposal to encourage the parallel programming
community to review and comment on it. Such input will help shape the
ultimate direction of this feature, so that it may best serve the
needs of advanced parallel application developers.
--
Dmitriy V'jukov
