Can Sun Monetize Java with Transactional Memory?

Admittedly I know very little about concurrent computing. But the consensus seems to be that it’s the future. We can’t keep building faster CPUs so we are just going with more of them. This presents a problem for software that can’t easily be split into pieces. If some CPU intensive piece of code can’t be chopped up to run in parallel then it is constrained by the speed of a single CPU. So what is the solution? Some think that the programming models need to change to better accommodate parallel computing. The problem is that no matter how smart the programming model is at splitting stuff up you are always going to be blocked by IO operations - memory, ram, network, etc. Others think that one solution may be Transactional Memory. This can potentially alleviate the problem of threads waiting for locks.

Allegedly Sun is working on implementing Transactional Memory in their next generation of processors. Now what if the Sun Java Virtual Machine were tuned to run unbelievably fast on these new processors? One missing piece to this theory is the programming model. I haven’t done a lot of concurrent programming but I hear it’s quite difficult to get right in Java. Allegedly the concept of Agents in Scala (which runs on the JVM) makes concurrent programming much easier. Combine Agents with Transaction Memory and a JVM tuned to take advantage of it and maybe we could see a significant performance boost associated with the multi-core/cpu machines.

I’ve always liked Sun hardware but with the low cost of Intel and AMD hardware the additional cost may not seem worth it. However if Sun hardware ran my Java 10x faster I’d be totally sold. Now that is an interesting way for Sun to monetize Java… At least for a while.