Hardware Transactional Memory System
Yi Liu · Journal of Chinese Computer Systems · 2013
The development of multi-core processor brings large amount of hardware parallelism for the software,which puts forward higher requirements for the software parallel programming technique.The traditional parallel programming is based on the lock mechanism,but there exists many problems.Transactional memory proposed to improve the programmability is thought as the most promising parallel programming mechanism.Hardware transactional memory is attractive because it′s fast and highly efficient.The paper describes the basic concept,execution model and programming interface of transactional memory.Three main functions of hardware transactional memory are introduced and two typical hardware transactional memory systems are shown.The hot research fields and challenges of hardware transactional memory systems are discussed.Finally,a few research platforms and benchmarck workloads are introduced.