In general, I haven't seen algorithms guaranteeing serializability or atomicity that complete without a round trip to at least one other replica (or a possibly long trip to the master). Intuitively, the impossibility results dictate that this must be the case, otherwise partitioned replicas could safely serve requests. Daniel Abadi has a great post about this latency-consistency trade-off: http://dbmsmusings.blogspot.com/2010/04/problems-with-cap-an...
With HATs, you only need to contact one replica for every key. This is to goal behind our definition of "high availability" (http://www.bailis.org/blog/hat-not-cap-introducing-highly-av...).
In general, I haven't seen algorithms guaranteeing serializability or atomicity that complete without a round trip to at least one other replica (or a possibly long trip to the master). Intuitively, the impossibility results dictate that this must be the case, otherwise partitioned replicas could safely serve requests. Daniel Abadi has a great post about this latency-consistency trade-off: http://dbmsmusings.blogspot.com/2010/04/problems-with-cap-an...