Grand Central WAGgery
Apple’s announcement of their Grand Central technology sounds interesting, but it’s pretty light on details. Here’s my wild guess, based on the intersection of what they’ve hinted at and what I would do if I were in their shoes: my guess is that they’re integrating support for fine-grained scheduling (as in e.g. TBB) into the OS scheduler, which would enable smarter global decisions about things like work balancing and cache warmth.
Think M:N threads with better kernel support, but minus the usual attempt to make the “userspace” portion of the scheduler preemptive. If they’re smart, they’ll also include non-blocking/asynchronous equivalents of standard blocking APIs, though in principle with sufficient kernel support they could also permit tasks to use some blocking operations in more transparent ways.
I guess we’ll see how good my guess was in a year or so.