Emulating Intel TSX instructions

Question

I'd like to experiment with the new Intel TSX instructions in advance of the chip becoming available. Does Intel make an emulator available, or is there some other technique that is widely used?

Answer 1

It is important to note that if you work for any medium to large company, Intel may ship you free hardware (as happened to us).

For this experiment one needs the recent version (5.31) of Intel® Software Development Emulator (Intel® SDE) and a compiler that can generate RTM instructions (via intrinsics or direct machine code). Please note that performance measurements with Intel SDE running RTM are of limited value because the overhead of emulating TM in software instead of using real hardware is huge, but as you will see later Intel SDE can already demonstrate important points for RTM usage for concurrency library developers and application programmers.

See http://software.intel.com/en-us/blogs/2012/11/06/exploring-intel-transactional-synchronization-extensions-with-intel-software