[sweetjuly]

Memory ordering tends not to play much into the design issues of xMP systems. As long as you have a coherent and properly scalable cache and NoC, the actual memory ordering of the local processor is irrelevant to the total performance of the system since the LSU and L1 cache are (typically) responsible from providing ordering. The reason why most architectures use weaker memory ordering rules is that it allows you to more easily build faster individual cores as it makes it much easier to extract memory parallelism.

[saagarjha]

Yep. There are plenty of Intel processors that have plenty of cores (and multiple sockets, even).