The AMD Advanced Synchronization Facility (ASF) - perhaps of interest to the D programming community ?

[Nick B]

Overview:

The AMD Advanced Synchronization Facility (ASF) is an experimental 
instruction set extension for the AMD64 architecture that would provide 
new capabilities for efficient synchronization of access to shared data 
in highly multithreaded applications as well as operating system 
kernels. ASF provides a means for software to inspect and update 
multiple shared memory locations atomically without having to rely on 
locks for mutual exclusion. It is intended to facilitate lock-free 
programming for highly concurrent shared data structures, allowing more 
complex and higher performance manipulation of such structures than is 
practical with traditional techniques based on compare-swap instructions 
such as CMPXCHG16B. ASF code can also interoperate with lock-based code, 
or with _Software Transactional Memory_.

Some basic usage examples of ASF are provided in the specification. 
However, we expect the programming community could readily use the power 
and flexibility of ASF to implement very sophisticated, robust and 
innovative concurrent data structure algorithms, and we encourage such 
experimentation. AMD will be releasing a simulation framework in the 
near future to facilitate this.

AMD is releasing this proposal to encourage the parallel programming 
community to review and comment on it. Such input will help shape the 
ultimate direction of this feature, so that it may best serve the needs 
of advanced parallel application developers.

Discussion:
http://forums.amd.com/devblog/blogpost.cfm?catid=317&threadid=114715&utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+AmdDeveloperBlogs+%28AMD+Developer+Blogs%29
  and here
http://forums.amd.com/devblog/blogpost.cfm?catid=317&threadid=118419&utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+AmdDeveloperBlogs+%28AMD+Developer+Blogs%29


The spec can be found here:

http://developer.amd.com/cpu/ASF/Pages/default.aspx


regards
Nick B