Transactional Memory: Hardware Simplification

This lecture delves into the concept of transactional memory, focusing on hardware-based solutions to simplify concurrency control. It covers the drawbacks of coarse-grained and fine-grained locking mechanisms, the probability of conflicts in hash tables, and the performance trade-offs. The instructor explains the benefits of hardware lock elision (HLE) and the transition to hardware transactional memory (TM). The lecture explores the composable nature of transactions, the implementation of TM in Intel processors, and the recovery mechanisms in case of conflicts. It concludes by discussing the extension of speculative data storage in caches and the detection policies for conflicts.