On Fri, 17 Aug 2007, Segher Boessenkool wrote:

"volatile" has nothing to do with reordering.  atomic_dec() writes
to memory, so it _does_ have "volatile semantics", implicitly, as
long as the compiler cannot optimise the atomic variable away
completely -- any store counts as a side effect.

Stores can be reordered. Only x86 has (mostly) implicit write ordering. So 
no atomic_dec has no volatile semantics and may be reordered on a variety 
of processors. Writes to memory may not follow code order on several 
processors.