Multi-core iOS devices are coming. Are you ready?

I recently gave a presentation at the Tampa iOS Developers Meetup about Grand Central Dispatch (GCD). If you are wondering how your application can take advantage of multi-core CPUs, then you'll likely want to become familiar with GCD.

Here's what I talk about in the presentation:

• Why did Apple create Grand Central Dispatch?


• The effect of multi-core CPUs on software developers.


• Why did the Desktop industry transition to multi-core CPUs?


• Will the mobile industry follow suite?


• The effect of over-flowing the pipeline. (threads vs available cores)


• The OS imposed difficulty in properly filling the pipeline.


• Real-world benchmarks of GCD vs traditional thread pools.


• How is GCD different from traditional multi-threading solutions?


• What GCD does NOT help you with.


• Threads vs GCD queues.


• What is a block exactly?


• How does memory-management work with blocks? (primitives & objects)


• Using the basic GCD APIs.


• Using GCD to help create thread-safe classes.


• Other advanced GCD topics

The video is not of the highest quality (crappy camera), but I hope the content will make up for it.

Watch The Video: Part 1 Part 2

Download the slides: Keynote | PDF

I've been doing a lot of work with GCD, and it's been great! It's not too difficult to learn, and the performance improvements have been impressive. We introduced a GCD based AsyncSocket library a few months ago, and found it to be up to 400% faster than the traditional thread/runloop version. And we also migrated CocoaHTTPServer to GCD and posted some impressive benchmarks.