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Holy crap, memory barriers! It's a modern architecture that's finally caught up to where Symbolics was at in the '80s. Seriously though, this is good news for concurrent garbage collected languages.

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Barriers are slow, and the more cores are hitting the barrier the slower it will be. The best news on that front was from the new GPU architecture parts, where they admitted that they're still going to expose the relaxed consistency memory model.

"Barriers are slow" in what way? Azul was hitting 10-20ms pauses while successfully garbage collecting 500GB+ heaps using hardware memory barriers on their Vega architecture, which had up to 768 CPUs.

Cliff Click, Azul's principal JVM architect, seemed somewhat ambivalent about how much hardware transactional memory actually helped them hit those targets (i.e. it's not a silver bullet), but he chided Sun for not including it on their Niagra chips when they were providing both the language runtime and the hardware platform.

I'll say it again: Getting them on a commodity architecture is a great thing for concurrent garbage collected languages.

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