If this just got you excited, consider reading Bartosz Milewski's post [0] about it. It's not too hard to understand, but it helps if you understand everything in the OP's posted blog.
So... C++ got a memory model, like Java 5? How did they manage without one?
The only real issue was portability. On any given system you could do that already before C++11. Now C++ standard hides those implementation details below unified abstraction.