It's a fine-grained (green) threading runtime and language extension. Here's one of the original papers on Cilk: [1]. The programming model is completely indepe

It's a fine-grained (green) threading runtime and language extension. Here's one of the original papers on Cilk: [1]. The programming model is completely independent of, and orthogonal to, whatever microarchitecture the pipeline has (and in fact out-of-order execution gets you benefits from multiple EUs for free, ish, modulo any SIMD optimizations you might do). [1] http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~chensm/Big_Data_reading_group/papers/blumofe-cilk-ppopp95.pdf http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~chensm/Big_Data_reading_group/papers/...