Who Ordered Memory Fences on an x86?

[Russell Lewis]

Nick Sabalausky wrote:
> Call me a grumpy old fart, but I'd be happy just tossing fences in 
> everywhere (when a multicore is detected) and be done with the whole mess, 
> just because trying to wring every little bit of speed from, say, a 3+ GHz 
> multicore processor strikes me as a highly unworthy pursuit. I'd rather 
> optimize for the lower end and let the fancy overpriced crap handle it 
> however it will.

Ok, I'm not going to go as far as that.  :)  But I've heard that Intel 
has been pondering doing almost that, at the hardware level.  The theory 
is that years from now, our CPUs will not be "one or a few extremely 
complex processors," but instead "hundreds or thousands of simplistic 
processors."  You could implement a pretty braindead execution model (no 
reordering, etc.) if you had 1024 cores all working in parallel.

The question, of course, is how fast the software will come along to the 
point where it can actually make use of that many cores.