Why are CAS (Atomic) operations faster than synchronized or volatile operations

[salils]

From what I understand, synchronized keyword syncs local thread cache with main memory. volatile keyword basically always reads the variable from the main memory at every access. Of course accessing main memory is much more expensive than local thread cache so these operations are expensive. However, a CAS operation use low level hardware operations but still has to access main memory. So how is a CAS operation any faster?

Thanks,
Salil