With the increasing availability and use of multicore processors Java developers need to acquire some understanding of the Java memory model.  This is because multithread applications that work nicely on a songle-core processor might exhibit "inexplicable" deficiencies when running on a multicore processor platform.  The reason may be differences in the caching strategies applied by different processors. 

In order to illustrate the issues this tutorial explains the Java features for multithread programming.  Key topics include: old and new locks, volatile and atomic variables, memory model, visibility and reordering issues, lock-free programming.