Amdahl's Law

Describes the performance gains from adding additional processing cores to an application with both serial and parrallel components.

$\begin{indisplay}\begin{split} &S = \textrm{Serial portion},S\in[0, 1] \\ &N=\t... ... cores} \\ \\ &speedup\leq\frac{1}{S+\frac{1-S}{N}} \end{split}\end{indisplay}$

(1)

This leads us to

$\displaystyle \lim_{N\to\infty}speedup = \frac{1}{S}$

(2)

Hence, the serial portion of the application has a disproportional effect on the performance gain from adding additional cores.