ITPEC IP April 2025 Question 17
Which of the following is an appropriate explanation of multitasking?
Explanation
CPU time is allocated to several processes in turn — the OS switches between them so quickly that they run concurrently.
In multitasking the operating system divides CPU time into short slices and hands them to the processes in turn, switching whenever a slice ends or a process waits for I/O. Even one CPU core, which executes one instruction stream at a time, thus lets several programs make progress at once, as the user sees it.
Answer (c)
Why not others:
- •(a) — several networked computers working together as one high-performance system is grid computing or a cluster, not an OS function of one computer
- •(b) — several processor cores in one CPU is a multi-core processor, a hardware design
- •(d) — one instruction applied to many data items is SIMD, the vector processing used in GPUs and multimedia instructions
Key rule: Multitasking is an OS scheduling technique for sharing a CPU; multi-core, clustering and SIMD are hardware ways of doing work in parallel.
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