What's Next FOR THE X86?

The article reports on the development of x86 family of microprocessors, designed by Intel Corp. Justin Rattner, Intel's chief technology officer, cites advancements such as hardware support for memory management and virtualization that have been added to the chip and refined over the years. According to Todd Mowry, a computer science professor at Carnegie Mellon University and an Intel research consultant, one of the most promising approaches today to exploiting the parallelism in multicore chips is the use of something called software transactional memory.