Recent posts en Transactional memory support: the
speculative_spin_mutex <p>Intel recently released the 4th
Generation Intel® Core™ processors, which have <a href="">Intel®
Transactional Synchronization Extensions (Intel® TSX)</a>
enabled.  Intel TSX can improve the performance of applications
that use lock-based synchronization to protect data structure
updates.  This feature allows multiple non-conflicting lock-
protected changes to data to occur in parallel.</p> <p>I’ve
found over the years one of the best ways to improve parallel
performance is to get rid of coarse-grained locks, replacing
them with multiple fine-grained locks to protect the structure
being modified.  While this technique can yield better
performance, it is difficult to get right, and increases the
number of locks that must be acquired to perform an operation. 
There may also be subtle performance problems if multiple locks
occupy the same cache line; though the changes themselves may
not overlap, locking adjacent mutexes in the same cache