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Support for C/C++0x atomic operations

Dmitry_Vyukov
Valued Contributor I
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Does Intel have some plans to support "fine-grained" atomic operations in future x86 processors in the context of emerging C/C++0x standard and it's support for such operations?

Particularly I mean atomic RMW operations (XADD, XCHG, CMPXCHG, ADD, AND etc) with fine-grained memory ordering parameters. For example:

std::atomic_xchg(x, 1, std::memory_order_relaxed);

or:

std::atomic_fetch_sub(x, 1, std::memory_order_release);

The main point is that programs relying on C/C++0x atomic API will be able to transparently benefit from those fine-grained hardware operations.

Since load on x86 is always acquire, and store is always release, so I think it will be difficult to eliminate acquire/release fences, i.e. provide real relaxed operations. But at least store-load memory fence can be eliminated from atomic RMW operations. Is it possible/feasible?

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AaronTersteeg
Employee
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Quoting - Dmitriy Vyukov

Does Intel have some plans to support "fine-grained" atomic operations in future x86 processors in the context of emerging C/C++0x standard and it's support for such operations?

Particularly I mean atomic RMW operations (XADD, XCHG, CMPXCHG, ADD, AND etc) with fine-grained memory ordering parameters. For example:

std::atomic_xchg(x, 1, std::memory_order_relaxed);

or:

std::atomic_fetch_sub(x, 1, std::memory_order_release);

The main point is that programs relying on C/C++0x atomic API will be able to transparently benefit from those fine-grained hardware operations.

Since load on x86 is always acquire, and store is always release, so I think it will be difficult to eliminate acquire/release fences, i.e. provide real relaxed operations. But at least store-load memory fence can be eliminated from atomic RMW operations. Is it possible/feasible?


Dmitriy,
Intel generally does not comment on future architectures but we have announced Intel AVX. There is a good overview paper on the new instructions and capabilities.

Cheers,
Aaron
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Dmitry_Vyukov
Valued Contributor I
552 Views
As far as I understand it's not quite what I was talking about.
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