Techniques are described for a multi-processor having two or more processors that increases the opportunity for a load-exclusive command to take a cache line in an Exclusive state, which results in increased performance when a store-exclusive is executed. A new bus operation read prefer exclusive is used as a hint to other caches that a requesting master is likely to store to the cache line, and, if possible, the other cache should give the line up. In most cases, this will result in the other master giving the line up and the requesting master taking the line Exclusive. In most cases, two or more processors are not performing a semaphore management sequence to the same address at the same time. Thus, a requesting master's load-exclusive is able to take a cache line in the Exclusive state an increased number of times.