multithreaded ==>
multithreading
<parallel> Sharing a single CPU between multiple tasks (or "threads") in
a way designed to minimise the time required to switch threads. This is
accomplished by sharing as much as possible of the program execution environment
between the different threads so that very little state needs to be saved and
restored when changing thread.
Multithreading differs from multitasking in that threads share more of their
environment with each other than do tasks under multitasking. Threads may be
distinguished only by the value of their program counters and stack pointers
while sharing a single address space and set of global variables. There is thus
very little protection of one thread from another, in contrast to multitasking.
Multithreading can thus be used for very fine-grain multitasking, at the level
of a few instructions, and so can hide latency by keeping the processor busy
after one thread issues a long-latency instruction on which subsequent
instructions in that thread depend.
A light-weight process is somewhere between a thread and a full process.
TL0 is an example of a threaded machine language. Dataflow computation (E.g. Id
and SISAL) is an extreme form of multithreading.
(1997-12-23)
Nearby terms:
multitasking « Multi-tasking Program for
Microcomputers « multithreaded « multithreading
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