> The benefits you'd get from going to a weaker memory model are by not having that extra coherency in the critical path in the first place. Adding extra muxes

> The benefits you'd get from going to a weaker memory model are by not having that extra coherency in the critical path in the first place. Adding extra muxes in front of it to make it optional would be worse than just having it on all the time. Indeed true, good point. > That wouldn't help because two threads could be running at the same time on different cores against their respective L1 and store buffers. Of course, this was related to the cost of switching coherency protocol during context switch. But as you say the overhead of just making it switchable is prohibitive in itself.