[jerven]

Not for atomic writes, which is the important bit here. When dealing with concurrency the choice to make us will you allow tears when writing i.e. thread A writes aa and thread B writes bb. Will you allow the option of seeing ab or ba or only aa/bb. This is the thing that costs performance. Plus do you allow null which makes it harder too.

[muvlon]

That being said, x86_64 has supported 128-bit atomic writes via cmpxchg16b for over a decade. Modern 64-bit ARM has several ways to do them as well.

Probably still not widespread enough for OpenJDK to unconditionally assume it's supported, but I think we're getting there. (Is there "caniuse" for CPU features?)

[Coelacanthus]

cmpxchg16b can only handle 64bits data correctly because of ABA problem.