Sure you can make wild, individualistic boasts about having a 22nm fabrication process and three different GPUs,
but that stuff counts for nothing without the magic of cooperation. The
Amish know that and so does Intel, which is why its forthcoming Haswell
cores will support Transactional Synchronization Extensions (TSX) -- a
new instruction set designed to allow cores to work together more
closely without hammering each others' fingers. TSX takes greater
responsibility for the division of labor between cores at the hardware
level, relieving the software programmer of some of this burdensome duty
and hopefully allowing for finer-grained threading as a result. The
system also relies on inherent optimism, with each core assuming that
the others have handled their part of the work successfully. Inevitably,
there'll be occasions when this happy belief gets splintered and a bad
job has to be started again from scratch, but on average things should
get done quicker and leave more energy for the barn dance.
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