Multi threaded programming in computer language is the central processing unit’s ability or the ability of a single core present in a multi-core processor to execute multiple threads or processes all the at the same time all supported by the operating system. The approach, in this case, is different from multiple processing as here the threads and processes need to share resources from single or multiple cores, the CPU caches, the computing units and the TLB or translation look a side buffer.
Multithreaded programming is aimed at improving the utilization of a single core by making use of threaded level and instruction level parallelism and this is in the case of multiprocessing systems that includes multiple complete processing units. Since, both the techniques are complementary to each other; they can be combined in multiple multithreading CPUs systems.
Multi threaded applications have become very popular these days and there are advantages and disadvantages associated with it. Here in this article we look at its advantages and disadvantages in details.
In the case of a lot of cache misses of a thread, the other threads can continue with taking the advantages of the computer resources that are unused and this leads to a faster overall execution. This happens as if only a single thread was executed, these resources would have been idle. If a thread is not able to make use of all the computing resources available with the CPU as the instructions depend on the results of one another, the running of another thread prevents these resources from becoming idle.
The Cache can be shared when many threads are working on the same set of data and this leads to better cache synchronization and usage on its value. These are the advantages of the multithread program.