Volatile: Almost Useless for Multi-Threaded Programming

"There is a widespread notion that the keyword volatile is good for multi-threaded programming. I've seen interfaces with volatile qualifiers justified as 'it might be used for multi-threaded programming'. I thought was useful until the last few weeks, when it finally dawned on me (or if you prefer, got through my thick head) that volatile is almost useless for multi-threaded programming. I'll explain here why you should scrub most of it from your multi-threaded code."

http://software.intel.com/en-us/blogs/2007/11/30/volatile-almost-useless-for-multi-threaded-programming/