Instruction and logic to test transactional execution status

Novel instructions, logic, methods and apparatus are disclosed to test transactional execution status. Embodiments include decoding a first instruction to start a transactional region. Responsive to the first instruction, a checkpoint for a set of architecture state registers is generated and memory accesses from a processing element in the transactional region associated with the first instruction are tracked. A second instruction to detect transactional execution of the transactional region is then decoded. An operation is executed, responsive to decoding the second instruction, to determine if an execution context of the second instruction is within the transactional region. Then responsive to the second instruction, a first flag is updated. In some embodiments, a register may optionally be updated and/or a second flag may optionally be updated responsive to the second instruction.