One of the technologies for starting tasks asynchronously is Grand Central Dispatch (GCD). This technology takes the thread management code you would normally write in your own applications and moves that code down to the system level. All you have to do is define the tasks you want to execute and add them to an appropriate dispatch queue. GCD takes care of creating the needed threads and of scheduling your tasks to run on those threads. Because the thread management is now part of the system, GCD provides a holistic approach to task management and execution, providing better efficiency than traditional threads.
Operation queues are Objective-C objects that act very much like dispatch queues. You define the tasks you want to execute and then add them to an operation queue, which handles the scheduling and execution of those tasks. Like GCD, operation queues handle all of the thread management for you, ensuring that tasks are executed as quickly and as efficiently as possible on the system.
https://developer.apple.com/library/content/documentation/General/Conceptual/ConcurrencyProgrammingGuide/ConcurrencyandApplicationDesign/ConcurrencyandApplicationDesign.html#//apple_ref/doc/uid/TP40008091-CH100-SW2