by Ulrich Drepper, Red Hat for ACM Queue
While still primarily a research project, transactional memory shows promise for making parallel programming easier.

With the speed of individual cores no longer increasing at the rate we came to love over the past decades, programmers have to look for other ways to increase the speed of our ever-more-complicated applications. The functionality provided by the CPU manufacturers is an increased number of execution units, or CPU cores.

To use these extra cores, programs must be parallelized. Multiple paths of execution have to work together to complete the tasks the program has to perform, and as much of that work as possible has to happen concurrently. Only then is it possible to speed up the program.

Making it a reality is another issue. Simply writing a normal program by itself is a problem, as can be seen in the relentless stream of bug fixes available for programs. Trying to split a program into multiple pieces that can be executed in parallel adds a whole dimension of additional problems

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