Intel® Threading Building Blocks (TBB) offers a rich and complete approach to expressing parallelism in a C++ program. It is a library that helps you take advantage of multi-core processor performance without having to be a threading expert. Threading Building Blocks is not just a threads-replacement library. It represents a higher-level, task-based parallelism that abstracts platform details and threading mechanisms for scalability and performance.
I participated in the design and development of a couple of concurrency libraries for shared-memory multiprocessors long before such machines were popular. So when I started using java.util.concurrent I was already somewhat comfortable with the concepts.