3.2 Memory Model

There is no guarantee that memory accesses by multiple threads to the same variable without synchronization are atomic with respect to each other. Several implementation-dependent and application-dependent factors affect whether accesses are atomic or not. Some variables might be larger than the largest atomic memory operation on the target platform. Some variables might be mis-aligned or of unknown alignment and the compiler or the run-time system may need to use multiple loads/stores to access the variable. Sometimes there are faster code sequences that use more loads/stores.