Agreed. But! Not all architectures implement atomic operations by locking the bus, as x86 does. The Power architecture uses load-linked, stored-conditional (htt

Agreed. But! Not all architectures implement atomic operations by locking the bus, as x86 does. The Power architecture uses load-linked, stored-conditional (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Load-link/store-conditional https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Load-link/store-conditional) where when you load a value, you can say "pay attention to who modifies this value," and when you go to store the value, you can say "only actually store this value if no one else modified it."