I was checking out Intel's "whatif" site and their Transactional Memory compiler (each thread has to make atomic commits or rollback the system's memory, like a Database would).
It seems like a promising way to replace locks and mutexes but I can't find many testimonials. Does anyone here have any input?
I have not used Intel's compiler, however, Herb Sutter had some interesting comments on it...
From Sutter Speaks: The Future of Concurrency
Do you see a lot of interest in and usage of transactional memory, or is the concept too difficult for most developers to grasp?
It's not yet possible to answer who's using it because it hasn't been brought to market yet. Intel has a software transactional memory compiler prototype. But if the question is "Is it too hard for developers to use?" the answer is that I certainly hope not. The whole point is it's way easier than locks. It is the only major thing on the research horizon that holds out hope of greatly reducing our use of locks. It will never replace locks completely, but it's our only big hope to replacing them partially.
There are some limitations. In particular, some I/O is inherently not transactional—you can't take an atomic block that prompts the user for his name and read the name from the console, and just automatically abort and retry the block if it conflicts with another transaction; the user can tell the difference if you prompt him twice. Transactional memory is great for stuff that is only touching memory, though.
Every major hardware and software vendor I know of has multiple transactional memory tools in R&D. There are conferences and academic papers on theoretical answers to basic questions. We're not at the Model T stage yet where we can ship it out. You'll probably see early, limited prototypes where you can't do unbounded transactional memory—where you can only read and write, say, 100 memory locations. That's still very useful for enabling more lock-free algorithms, though.