ITPEC IP October 2025 Question 22
Which of the following is the appropriate description of multithreading?
Explanation
Dividing one application program into multiple process units and processing them in parallel — that is multithreading.
A thread is a unit of execution inside a process. A multithreaded program splits its work into several threads that share the process's memory and open files, and the OS schedules them concurrently; on a multi-core CPU they can run truly at the same time. A web browser, for example, downloads a page in one thread while another keeps the screen responding to the user. Multitasking, by contrast, runs several separate programs (processes) concurrently.
Answer (c)
Why not others:
- •(a) — equipping a CPU with several cores is a multi-core processor, hardware that lets threads run in parallel but is not multithreading itself
- •(b) — using a hard disk to provide an address space larger than main memory is virtual memory
- •(d) — splitting data and writing it to several disks in parallel is striping (RAID 0)
Key rule: Multitasking runs several programs at once, multithreading splits one program into threads, and multi-core supplies the hardware that runs them simultaneously.
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