SIMD CPU instructions
Single Instruction Multiple Data (SIMD) is a technique that is available on many modern processors and can speed up execution by parallelizing calculations even in a single thread on one core. SIMD takes advantage of additional instructions available on CPUs to operate on sets of values (vectors) rather than just single values (scalars).
The most common instruction set for this is called Streaming SIMD Extensions 2 (SSE2) and it has been around for over 15 years since its debut with the Pentium 4. A newer instruction set called Advanced Vector Extensions (AVX) offers superior performance over SSE2 and has been around for over five years. So, if you're using a reasonably recent x86-64 CPU, then you should have access to these extra instructions.
Note
Some ARM CPUs (such as those in the Raspberry Pi 2 and 3) contain a similar technology called NEON, officially known as Advanced SIMD. This is not currently supported in .NET, but may be in the future. An official open source...