ConcurrentHashMap revealed

Java 1.5 introduced some new cool concurrency stuff which is located in java.util.concurrent package. There are lots of good things there including new ConcurrentHashMap class which I'm going to talk about. That class is targeted to be used in concurrent environment and provides significant performance benefits over synchronized version of HashMap. Javadoc doesn't really provide lots of details on how that class works and why can be better than synchronized version of HashMap. I think that understanding of these details is crucial for using that class in a right way, so I've made some research to undercover implementation details and mechanisms used to implement that class.