The dispatcher is responsible for moving processes from the ready queue to the CPU for execution as part of the CPU scheduler. A process is a program that can create child processes and takes more time to terminate than a thread. A thread is a segment of a process that shares memory and other resources with other threads of the same process. Key differences between processes and threads include that processes are isolated while threads share resources, processes have their own address space while threads share the parent's address space, and context switching is faster for threads than processes.