IMHO Restricted Transactional Memory (RTM) is something different than simply blocking until you acquire the lock. There are also full software implementations

IMHO Restricted Transactional Memory (RTM) is something different than simply blocking until you acquire the lock. There are also full software implementations (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_transactional_memory http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_transactional_memory). Basically the code path is executed optimistically and in case of conflicts the application has to handle it somehow.