A method and apparatus for monitor and mwait in a distributed cache architecture is disclosed. One embodiment includes an execution thread sending a MONITOR request for an address to a portion of a distributed cache that stores the data corresponding to that address. At the distributed cache portion the MONITOR request and an associated speculative state is recorded locally for the execution thread. The execution thread then issues an MWAIT instruction for the address. At the distributed cache portion the MWAIT and an associated wait-to-trigger state are recorded for the execution thread. When a write request matching the address is received at the distributed cache portion, a monitor-wake event is then sent to the execution thread and the associated monitor state at the distributed cache portion for that execution thread can be reset to idle.