Thanks for the links, they're really informative. That said, it doesn't seem to be entirely certain that the extra work done by the x86 arch would incur a comparatively huge difference in energy consumption. Granted, that isn't really the point of the article. I would love to hear from someone who's more well versed in CPU design on the impact of it's memory model. The paper is more interesting with regards to performance but I don't find it very conclusive since it's comparing ARM vs TSO on an ARM processor. It does link this paper which seems more relevant to our discussion but a shame that it's paywalled.