Ordered atomic operations like C++ std::atomic or java/C# volatile do guarantee some ordering. For example if one thread modifies an object and then stores a pointer to an atomic variable, under default visibility rules, another thread reading that pointer from the atomic variable is guaranteed to see the modifications to the object itself, i.e. the update, the store and the remote load are ordered.

It is possible to have a model where all atomic operations are relaxed (i.e. unordered) and use explicit barriers for ordering (which is closer to how some, but not all, CPUs work), but it is significantly harder to reason about and prove algorithms correct under it.

edit: wording