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From: Patrick Twohig (p-twohig_at_[hidden])
Date: 2008-04-18 11:31:43


Another article talks about writing on the Xbox360, which is what I needed a
queue for: http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb310595(VS.85).aspx

On Fri, Apr 18, 2008 at 3:51 AM, Giovanni Piero Deretta <gpderetta_at_[hidden]>
wrote:

> On Fri, Apr 18, 2008 at 3:09 AM, Cory Nelson <phrosty_at_[hidden]> wrote:
> > On Thu, Apr 17, 2008 at 5:24 PM, Patrick Twohig <p-twohig_at_[hidden]>
> wrote:
> > > Theoretically, the CAS should atomically compare and swap the value
> in one
> > > clock cycle. However, with multiple cores/processors/hyper
> threading where
> > > multiple instructions are being executed simultaneously over
> arbitrary
> > > numbers of clock cycles. There can be writes pending while you want
> to read
> > > from memory. As a result, when you go to read something another
> process
> > > will have written to but you read stale data. To combat this, you
> enforce a
> > > memory barrier, which guarantees that all pending memory
> transactions before
> > > the barrier have completed before moving on with the program.
> Additionally,
> > > some architectures (like x86) allow for unaligned access of memory.
> When an
> > > unaligned value is accessed, it sets an exception then it replaces
> the
> > > single read/write operation with multiple bus operations which
> wreaks havoc
> > > on any compare/swap operations.
> >
> > They don't happen in a single cycle, I don't think there is anything
> > specifying that they should. Barriers aren't needed on x86 or x64,
> > other than compile-time only ones to make sure the compiler doesn't
> > reorder something.
> >
>
> Well, you actually need StoreLoad memory barriers on x86. All other
> barriers are always implicit (unless you use non temporal SSE
> store/loads).
>
> StoreLoad is also implicit if you use locked operations, otherwise you
> need an explicit mfence.
>
> See, for example, http://g.oswego.edu/dl/jmm/cookbook.html
>
> --
> gpd
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