Volatile Vs Atomic

The effect of the volatile keyword is approximately that each individual read or write operation on that variable is made atomically visible to all threads.

Notably, however, an operation that requires more than one read/write -- such as i++, which is equivalent to i = i + 1, which does one read and one write -- is not atomic, since another thread may write to i between the read and the write.

The Atomic classes, like AtomicInteger and AtomicReference, provide a wider variety of operations atomically, specifically including increment for AtomicInteger.

Volatile and Atomic are two different concepts. Volatile ensures, that a certain, expected (memory) state is true across different threads, while Atomics ensure that operation on variables are performed atomically.

Take the following example of two threads in Java:

Thread A:

value = 1;
done = true;

Thread B:

if (done)
  System.out.println(value);

Starting with value = 0 and done = false the rule of threading tells us, that it is undefined whether or not Thread B will print value. Furthermore value is undefined at that point as well! To explain this you need to know a bit about Java memory management (which can be complex), in short: Threads may create local copies of variables, and the JVM can reorder code to optimize it, therefore there is no guarantee that the above code is run in exactly that order. Setting done to true and then setting value to 1 could be a possible outcome of the JIT optimizations.

volatile only ensures, that at the moment of access of such a variable, the new value will be immediately visible to all other threads and the order of execution ensures, that the code is at the state you would expect it to be. So in case of the code above, defining done as volatile will ensure that whenever Thread B checks the variable, it is either false, or true, and if it is true, then value has been set to 1 as well.

As a side-effect of volatile, the value of such a variable is set thread-wide atomically (at a very minor cost of execution speed). This is however only important on 32-bit systems that i.E. use long (64-bit) variables (or similar), in most other cases setting/reading a variable is atomic anyways. But there is an important difference between an atomic access and an atomic operation. Volatile only ensures that the access is atomically, while Atomics ensure that the operation is atomically.

Take the following example:

i = i + 1;

No matter how you define i, a different Thread reading the value just when the above line is executed might get i, or i + 1, because the operation is not atomically. If the other thread sets i to a different value, in worst case i could be set back to whatever it was before by thread A, because it was just in the middle of calculating i + 1 based on the old value, and then set i again to that old value + 1. Explanation:

Assume i = 0
Thread A reads i, calculates i+1, which is 1
Thread B sets i to 1000 and returns
Thread A now sets i to the result of the operation, which is i = 1

Atomics like AtomicInteger ensure, that such operations happen atomically. So the above issue cannot happen, i would either be 1000 or 1001 once both threads are finished.