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There is much speculation lately around the future of the Rock processor, now that (as seems highly likely) Sun will be absorbed into Oracle. Many of Sun's businesses will find a place in the Oracle structure: the storage business, the server business, the OS business, the Java business all have ways of being absorbed into a sensible Oracle strategy for growth. Sun's processor development business on the other hand seems out of place in this context.
Analyst and journalist speculation is that the most likely outcome will be that Sun terminates the processor development business prior to the Oracle take-over. The end of the Rock processor will not stall the rise of multicore processors: multicore is now the norm. Rock's 16 cores are now nothing remarkable. Being able to run two threads per core is no longer remarkable. Would the demise of this processor, which has been five years in the making so far, be at all remarkable? Well yes.
Rock was going to support hardware transactional memory. To loose this is indeed something to remark on.
Shared memory concurrency is hard. Shared memory parallelism is even harder. The problem is synchronizing access to storage being used by multiple threads. Programmers generally get it wrong. The problem is that the tools of locks, semaphores and monitors are all too low-level for the average application programmer. What is needed is a higher level of abstraction. The same happened with memory allocation: explicit allocation of memory by programmers led to unmaintanable programs containing many errors, and lacking in portability, so new abstractions were introduced to make things workable.
Transactional memory is one technique being proposed for ameliorating the problems of synchronization in shared memory parallel systems. Experiments with software transaction memory have been very encouraging. However being in software they have some performance issues. Hardware transactional memory would really have been a revolutionary step forward.
So if the Rock processor will never be manufactured, will Intel, AMD, IBM, etc. step up and add hardware transactional memory to their chip lines?