Combining multiprocessing with multithreading

Virtually any modern system combines multiprocessing with multithreading, courtesy of multi-core CPUs, which combine two or more processing cores on a single processor die. What this means for an operating system is that it has to schedule tasks both across multiple processing cores while also scheduling them on specific cores in order to extract maximum performance.

This is the area of task schedulers, which we will look at in a moment. Suffice it to say that this is a topic worthy of its own book.