Concurrency vs Parallelism

Concurrency vs Parallelism

Understanding how our systems handle multiple tasks can be tricky. Often, the terms Concurrency and Parallelism are used interchangeably, but they represent two different concepts in computing.

• Concurrency is about dealing with a lot of things at once. A single CPU core switches back and forth between multiple tasks so quickly that it feels like they are happening at the same time.
• Parallelism is about doing a lot of things at once. Multiple CPU cores execute different tasks simultaneously, at the exact same moment.

Use the interactive visualizer below to see the difference in action.