Wouldn't this be the case anyway (cache coherency overhead) even if we used types that just-so-happened to be atomic on the platform, such as "int"? In other w

Wouldn't this be the case anyway (cache coherency overhead) even if we used types that just-so-happened to be atomic on the platform, such as "int"? In other words, isn't this a non issue when comparing the performance of atomic types and "regular" types, as they both would require this? Also, do the atomic types handle ordering? I could be going crazy, but I remember seeing some of those atomic types simply being typedef'd to "int" in some OS code before. EDIT: I was thinking of the "atomic_t, atomic_inc, atomic_set, etc..." in the Linux Kernel. It guarantees atomic behavior, but not ordering. Memory barriers are still required when using it between different threads. The C11 types appear to be different, as they accept an ordering argument in their load/store functions.