Who ordered memory fences on an x86? (2008)

The Intel x86 memory model, detailed in Intel 64 Architecture Memory Ordering White Paper and the AMD spec, AMD64 Architecture Programmer’s Manual, list a lot of memory ordering guarantees, among them:

The x86 also has (expensive–on the order of 100 cycles) memory fence instructions, mfence, lfence, and sfence; but, considering all those guarantees, why would anyone use them? There is one important non-guarantee listed in the x86 spec:

Here’s an example from the x86 spec: x and y are in shared memory and they are both initialized to zero, r1 and r2 are processor registers. It can be put anywhere between the store of zeroWants and the load of oneWants in one thread, and between the store of oneWants and the load of zeroWants in the other thread.

Source: bartoszmilewski.com