> AtomicUsize: Used for indexing and freelist linkage. It’s a plain old number, except it’s watched 24 / 7 by the CPU’s race condition alarm.
Is it though? Aren't atomic load/store instructions the actual important thing. I know the type system ensures that `AtomicUsize` can only be accessed using atomic instructions but saying it's being watched by the CPU is inaccurate.
I'm not sure what the author intended, but one way to implement atomics at the microarchitectural level is via a load-linked/store-conditional pair of instructions, which often involves tracking the cache line for modification.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Load-link/store-conditional
It's not "24/7" but it is "watching" in some sense of the word. So not entirely unfair.