Comment by mjb

This is a really interesting article. Multi-core ARM seems to be the first really mainstream processor architecture that behaves this way. There have been others, like Alpha, but none have achieved the ubiquity that mult-core ARM has achieved. I suspect a side-effect of this is that many of the "threads are hard" effects that are hidden by x86 will come back to bite a lot of programmers. I think we are going to be seeing a lot more "threads are hard" and "threads and weird" posts in the near future, and hopefully better learning material about threading issues in the longer term. Even more hopefully, this might drive more research and development into abstractions for providing parallelism and concurrency in ways that hide the complexity of threads.