It’s actually a significant process, since as Craig Mundie, Microsoft’s Chief Research and Strategy Officer, admits, “Win32 was never designed for highly concurrent, asynchronous processing” and “parallelism requires adjustments at every level of the stack.” The first steps toward the larger project of re-arranging tasks and runtimes in different layers to take advantage of multiple-core will happen in Windows 7 though, such as an updated scheduler. There will be other adjustments along these lines as well, though we probably won’t know everything until October.

So while it’s unlikely that Windows 7 be as deeply in tune with parallel processing as Snow Leopard looks to be, it’ll definitely be able to use a SWAT team of cores better than your Vista box will, and set the stage for Windows 8 to have a solid parallel processing foundation. [ZD Net]