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Alex Rivera
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x86 and other architectures provide special atomic instructions (lock, cmpxchg, etc.) that allow you to write 'lock free' data structures. But as more and more cores are added, it seems as though the work these instructions will actually have to do behind the scenes will grow (at least to maintain cache coherency?). If an atomic add takes ~100 cycles today on a dual core system, might it take significantly longer on the 80+ core machines of the future? If you're writing code to last, might it actually be a better idea to use locks even if they're slower today?
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