Comment Re:Does it support TSX? (Score 1) 180
Well, for video games (or anything you sell to the consumer), you clearly do not want to rely on Intel's transactional extensions because doing so could significantly reduce or destroy performance on any customer systems that don't have them.
Basically the way the basic (the prefixed) transactional extension works is to avoid dirtying the cache line(s) associated with the spin lock or unlock operations, with the assumption that the operations which are run within the locked section are less likely to conflict than the spin lock itself.
Since spin locks are often used incorrectly and are often coarse-grained (or even global), this can yield significant improvements in performance.
However, it also HIDES the fact that the application was badly written. If you write an application which depends on the new extensions the result will be extremely poor performance on any cpu which does not support the extensions.
So as far as game design goes, the transaction stuff is worse than worthless. The transactional stuff is best used for turn-key (server-side) code where the hardware environment is under your control.
-Matt