In the history of computational world, sequential uni-processor computers have been exploited for years to solve scientific and business problems. To satisfy the demand of compute & data hungry applications, it was observed that better response time can be achieved only through parallelism. Large computational problems were partitioned and solved by using multiple CPUs in parallel. Computing performance was further improved by adopting multi-core architecture which provides hardware parallelism through use of multiple cores. Efficient resource utilization of a parallel computing environment by using software and hardware parallelism is a major research challenge. The present hardware technologies provide freedom to algorithm developers for control & management of resources through software codes, such as threads-to-cores mapping in recent multi-core processors. In this paper, a survey is presented since beginning of parallel computing up to the use of present state-of-art multi-core processors.