
686 CHAPTER 9 Hardware/Software Trade-Offs
the programmer. For a processor architecture, the specification it exports gov-
erns the reorderings that it allows and the order-preserving primitives it pro-
vides and is often called the
processor's
memory model
2.
The programmer's interface. The system specification is itself a consistency
model. A programmer may use it to reason about correctness and insert the
appropriate order-preserving mechanisms. However, this is a very low-level
interface for a programmer: parallel programming is challenging enough
without having to think about reorderings and write atomicity! The specific
reorderings and