Memory Models: x86 is TSO, TSO is Good

[Horizon68]

Hello,


Read the following interesting webpage:

Memory Models: x86 is TSO, TSO is Good

Essentially, the conclusion is that x86 in practice implements the old
SPARC TSO memory model.

The big take-away from the talk for me is that it confirms the
observation made may times before that SPARC TSO seems to be the optimal
memory model. It is sufficiently understandable that programmers can
write correct code without having barriers everywhere. It is
sufficiently weak that you can build fast hardware implementation that
can scale to big machines.


Read more here:

https://jakob.engbloms.se/archives/1435


Thank you,
Amine Moulay Ramdane.

[Chris M. Thomasson]

Relaxed Memory Ordering can scale better in certain scenarios. These are
very delicate in nature! One has to know what they are doing. I always
thought of the extreme wrt sequential consistency everywhere to be akin
to putting corks on the forks to protect programmers from injuring
themselves.