This is pretty leading edge, but the results do point to some good things trickling down in the future to certain kinds of desktop loads:
http://sc13.supercomputing.org/schedule/event_detail.php?evid=pap260
http://sc13.supercomputing.org/schedule/event_detail.php?evid=pap260
Intel has recently introduced Intel Transactional Synchronization Extensions (Intel TSX) in the Intel 4th Generation Core Processors. With Intel TSX, a processor can determine dynamically whether threads need to serialize through lock-protected critical sections. In this paper, we evaluate the first hardware implementation of Intel TSX using a set of high-performance computing (HPC) workloads and demonstrate that applying Intel TSX to these workloads can provide significant performance improvements. On a set of real-world HPC workloads, applying Intel TSX provides an average speedup of 1.41x. When applied to a parallel user-level TCP/IP stack, Intel TSX provides 1.31x average bandwidth improvement on network intensive applications. We also demonstrate the ease with which we were able to apply Intel TSX to the various workloads.