[Assess students' ability to analyze and compare performance and correctness trade-offs among locks, lock-free algorithms, and transactional memory in multicore systems. Scope includes throughput, latency, scalability under contention, fairness and progress guarantees (deadlock, livelock, starvation), memory ordering and consistency implications, synchronization and retry overheads, programming and verification complexity, interpreting benchmark results, and selecting appropriate mechanisms for different workload patterns (read-heavy, write-heavy, fine- vs. coarse-grained, real-time constraints). Expect reasoned recommendations and brief experimental designs to evaluate trade-offs.]