[miratrix]

I think there will be performance gains to be had, especially in applications where concurrency has been 'bolted on' (akin to the Big Kernel Lock).

However, I think what makes this interesting is not the raw performance it provides, but the functionality that it exposes. As far as I can tell, TSX will allow sets of operations to be executed, then "rolled back" in case of conflicts. This could greatly improve performance of Java code within synchronized blocks, for instance, or provide much faster hardware implementation of the software transaction memory model in Clojure.

I believe the biggest benefit of this will be making multi-threaded programming easier to get right, and get decent performance to boot. And if these constructs are supported natively in languages and frameworks, everyone will benefit from having 4- 8- or 16- cores.