Preface
For a number of years, home computers have given the illusion of doing multiple tasks simultaneously. This has been achieved by switching between the running tasks many times per second. This gives the appearance of simultaneous activity, but it is only an appearance. While the computer has been working on one task, the others have made no progress. An old computer that can execute only a single task at a time might be referred to as having a single processor, a single CPU, or a single “core.” The core is the part of the processor that actually does the work.
Recently, even home PCs have had multicore processors. It is now hard, if not impossible, to buy a machine that is not a multicore machine. On a multicore machine, each core can ...
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