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wmonroe

What ties the implementation of the atomic types to associative operations? I looked at a few C++11 references and saw that atomic is only implemented for integral, pointer, and Boolean types, but I didn't find anything about associativity being essential to the guarantee of atomicity. (Java also doesn't offer atomic floating-point types, and I've always wondered why not.)

mmp

It's mostly an issue of ensuring consistent results across different execution schedules. In other words, one definitely could implement hardware that provided atomic operations for non-associative operations (like floating-point addition), but then a program using them could generate different results across different runs (which is an undesirable property, in most cases.)

In other words, if some memory location had a value A and then two threads did atomic floating-point addition of values B and C, respectively, to A, one execution schedule could cause a series of operations ordered like:

A = (A + B) + C

and another schedule could cause:

A = (A + C) + B

which may give a different final value for A, with floating-point. For rendering, we may not care about this, but I think the general philosophy is that most application areas do care about consistency in this area.

FWIW in core/parallel.h in the PBRT code there's an atomic floating-point add built on top of atomic compare and exchange, which everyone does support for floats (since it's all just bits in that respect...)