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My question is about CPU architecture and the instruction set extension TSX-NI.

For which usage scenario is it useful, and especially is it useful for web development or running virtual machines and Docker?

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  • I nominate this post for reopening. As my answer is still getting upvotes, this means that this post answers a real concern.
    – harrymc
    Jun 23, 2022 at 12:41
  • @harrymc Well, it came up in my reopen-votes queue today (which I always check here on SO before the CV-queue), but since I'm the only vote, I'm guessing yours has expired.
    – NotTheDr01ds
    Jul 13, 2022 at 21:03

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In my opinion, TSX-NI does not provide an advantage for your listed use cases.

It's defined in Wikipedia as:

Transactional Synchronization Extensions (TSX-NI) is an extension to the x86 instruction set architecture (ISA) that adds hardware transactional memory support, speeding up execution of multi-threaded software through lock elision.

Unless you are running a product whose process creates a large number of threads, or a large number of processes that use the same shared memory, a faster method of achieving exclusive access to memory areas will not speed up the software.

In addition, to use TSX-NI, a software product must be specially programmed for it, which is mostly true for specialized applications such as multi-user database engines that are not in your scenario.

I believe that the software you have described will not benefit from this technology, but this is your decision. I just don't think that TSX-NI should be an important factor in your decision.

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    Please stop answering off-topic questions. It's not the first time we've asked you ...
    – DavidPostill ♦
    Mar 17, 2019 at 17:14
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    @DavidPostill I don't think that this is an off-topic question. I generally ask if TSX has any advantages for specific use cases and not which product to buy. So I'm asking you to remove the on hold flag.
    – ihmels
    Mar 17, 2019 at 17:23
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    @DavidPostill: This is not a hardware recommendation, but asking whether a certain technology is useful and for what. No commercial product was mentioned here. It has now come to the point that the mention of the keyword "buy" causes immediate closure. For the fun of it I reworded the post not to be off-topic but my answer still applies, so you may now reopen it. You could have done that yourself instead of closing it off-hand.
    – harrymc
    Mar 17, 2019 at 17:28

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