I don't understand how this is new. Don't Haskell and a couple other languages already do this? My understanding is Haskell has been made to run a million transactions simultaneously, so it's performant.
"Up until now, transactional memory research has mostly focused on software-based implementations. Real processors don't actually support transactional memory, so it has to be emulated in some way."
"BlueGene/Q moves transactional memory into the processor itself."
This is built on hardware. Haskel, Clojure and others have to emulate it with a much slower software implementation.