Do you need to know the dead/alive status of every cell at once.
Or would it be OK to check one cell and update its status, later another cell etc.
“Later” is relative, it depends on how fast everything works. But if you have to check a matrix of 1000x1000 cells and it takes 0.01 millisecond (as an example, I have no idea) per check it still takes 10 seconds to test all.
What are the number of rows and columns? I can try to figure something out.
Note:
No experience with multithreading so can’t advise on that.