Transactional Memory: Hardware Concurrency Control

This lecture covers the concept of transactional memory, focusing on hardware support for concurrency control. It discusses coarse-grained and fine-grained locking, their performance trade-offs, and difficulties. The instructor explains exercises on probability calculations for conflicting threads and the performance impact of different locking mechanisms. The lecture introduces the idea of lock elision and speculative execution to improve performance. It delves into hardware changes required for transactional memory, including speculative address tracking and conflict detection. The presentation concludes with a discussion on the benefits of hardware transactional memory and its implementation challenges.