Saying this as a big hardware atomics enjoyer: Static atomic variables are not fast, are not parallel and definitely are the worst kind of cache misses.

Atomics are also atomic only on that one single operation, such as manipulating a single number in a struct or swapping out a pointer from one version of an object to another. To atomically expose a set of changes to a datastructure, you either use a lock or swap the old for the new, which is the driving example in the article.