Multithreading (computer Architecture) - Overview

Overview

The multithreading paradigm has become more popular as efforts to further exploit instruction level parallelism have stalled since the late-1990s. This allowed the concept of throughput computing to re-emerge to prominence from the more specialized field of transaction processing:

• Even though it is very difficult to further speed up a single thread or single program, most computer systems are actually multi-tasking among multiple threads or programs.
• Techniques that would allow speedup of the overall system throughput of all tasks would be a meaningful performance gain.

The two major techniques for throughput computing are multiprocessing and multithreading.