[AceJohnny2]

Cache coherency on SoCs is one of the more hairy aspects, and one that's getting an increasing amount of attention from the software world.

Certainly for Mac it's a well-known topic, though I won't necessarily say it's all safe. Like I said: it's hairy.

(fun fact: when you have 10s-100s of millions of units out there, those "1 in a million" chances become all too frequent...)

[not2b]

Cache coherency for SoCs is usually proven with formal verification. It's a very good target for such techniques because the needed properties are straightforward to write down.

I'd be very surprised to see any respectable firm shipping a multicore chip where formal verification has not been done on the cache protocol.

Note that this isn't perfect; if a needed property was not written down and was not checked, errors can be missed. But people have been doing this for at least 15 years now, and there's academic work that is older.

Edit: this doesn't mean everyone does it right, there's at least one example in the comments about someone shipping buggy cache coherence.