GrandcentralDispatch: Because your device only has one processor, GCD probably only creates one thread for executing blocks and your blocks execute sequentially. You’ve created 10 different threads, though, and those each get a little piece of the available processing time. Fortunately, sleeping isn’t very processor-intensive, so all your threads run together pretty well. Try a similar test on a machine with 4 or 8 processing cores, and you’ll see GCD run more of your blocks in parallel.
The nice thing about GCD isn’t that it necessarily offers better performance than threads, it’s that the programmer doesn’t have to think about creating threads or matching the number of threads to the number of available processors. You can create lots of little tasks that will execute as a processor becomes available and let the system schedule those tasks for you.
