Architectures with strict alignment?

[Ivan Voras]

perryh at pluto.rain.com wrote:

> The degree to which a PowerPC imposes a strict alignment requirement
> depends on both the particular processor model and the operation
> being performed.
> 
> For ordinary integer arithmetic and logical operations, newer
> PPC processors tend to be more tolerant (although misalignment
> will typically carry a performance penalty).  For the semaphore
> primitives (lwarx/stwcx.) most PPC will require proper alignment
> and some will fault if the operand address is cache-inhibited
> (even though correctly aligned).

How would it behave in operations like

x = x + 1

where x is unaligned in memory? A RISC would have to load the value from
memory, increment it and store it.

I'm not particularly interested in slowdowns, just hard faults.

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