"Strong" CPUs cheat on their own memory model all the time
Fabian Giesen dismantles the idea that strong and weak memory models describe how CPUs actually behave. In practice nearly every core executes optimistically and "trusts, but verifies," rolling back misordered accesses only when contention is detected. The result: real scalability differences between x86 and ARM are far smaller than the theory implies. A clarifying mental model for anyone writing lock-free code.