nonatomic,atomic

atomic和nonatomic用来决定编译器生成的getter和setter是否为原子操作。

atomic

设置成员变量的@property属性时，默认为atomic，提供多线程安全。

 在多线程环境下，原子操作是必要的，否则有可能引起错误的结果。加了atomic，setter函数会变成下面这样：

 {lock}
if (property != newValue) { 
           [property release]; 
            property = [newValue retain]; 

}

{unlock}

 nonatomic

 禁止多线程，变量保护，提高性能。

atomic是Objc使用的一种线程保护技术，基本上来讲，是防止在写未完成的时候被另外一个线程读取，造成数据错误。而这种机制是耗费系统资源的，所以在iPhone这种小型设备上，如果没有使用多线程间的通讯编程，那么nonatomic是一个非常好的选择。

以上转自 http://blog.csdn.net/longzs/article/details/8149536

为了对atomic和nonatomic理解更为透彻，这里贴上一点我从stackoverflow找来的一段英文原文解释，感觉解释的很不错，英文比较好的童鞋可以口味一下。

Assuming that you are @synthesizing the method implementations, atomic vs. non-atomic changes the generated code. If you are writing your own setter/getters, atomic/nonatomic/retain/assign/copy are merely advisory. (Note: @synthesize is now the default behavior in recent versions of LLVM. There is also no need to declare instance variables; they will be synthesized automatically, too, and will have an _ prepended to their name to prevent accidental direct access).

With "atomic", the synthesized setter/getter will ensure that a whole value is always returned from the getter or set by the setter, regardless of setter activity on any other thread. That is, if thread A is in the middle of the getter while thread B calls the setter, an actual viable value -- an autoreleased object, most likely -- will be returned to the caller in A.

In nonatomic, no such guarantees are made. Thus, nonatomic is considerably faster than "atomic".

What "atomic" does not do is make any guarantees about thread safety. If thread A is calling the getter simultaneously with thread B and C calling the setter with different values, thread A may get any one of the three values returned -- the one prior to any setters being called or either of the values passed into the setters in B and C. Likewise, the object may end up with the value from B or C, no way to tell.

Ensuring data integrity -- one of the primary challenges of multi-threaded programming -- is achieved by other means.

英文解释出外   http://stackoverflow.com/questions/588866/whats-the-difference-between-the-atomic-and-nonatomic-attributes