Turing Lecture: The Computer Science of Concurrency: The Early Years. By Leslie Lamport
Communications of the ACM, Vol. 58 No. 6, Pages 71-76. acm 
Many modern multiprocessor computers provide a Memory Barrier (MB) instruction for implementing interprocess synchronization. Executing an instruction A then an MB then instruction B in a single process ensures that the execution of A precedes that of B.
Resolving a race requires an arbiter, a device that decides which of two events happens first.3 An arbiter can take arbitrarily long to make its decision. (A well-designed arbiter has an infinitesimal probability of taking very long.) Any mutual exclusion algorithm can therefore, in principle, take arbitrarily long to allow some waiting process to enter its critical section. This is not an artifact of any model. It appears to be a law of nature.
Producer-consumer synchronization has no inherent nondeterminism, hence no race condition. It can be implemented without an arbiter, so each operation can be executed in bounded time. It is a fundamentally different class of problem than mutual exclusion.
Because the standard model refers to global states, it has been argued that the model should not be used for reasoning about distributed algorithms and systems. While this argument sounds plausible, it is wrong. An invariant of a global system is a meaningful concept because it is a state predicate that is true for all possible global states, and so does not depend on any preferred global states.
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