does a atomic store cause a full cache flush or cache invalidate

I have been reading some articles and blogs, which describe atomics. All of them mention a value written by a store is visible to the subsequent load.

Can some one point me to direction or document, which describes how the memory is handled on a atomic writes.

1. One thing I read the store buffers are flushed - are they flushed all the way to the main memory?
2. Apart from this what else happens?
3. Are the caches on other CPUs invalidated?