Amdahl's law states that the overall performance improvement gained by optimizing a single part of a system is limited by the fraction of time that the improved part is actually used.
Speedup = Time to execute program on a single processor /Time to execute program on N parallel processors
Two important conclusion
- The use of parallel processors has little effect when f is small.
- There are diminishing returns for using more processors when N approaches infinity.
Speedup = Performance after enhancement / Performance before enhancement
Speedup = Execution time before enhancement / Execution time after enhancement
f - portion of the code that can be processed in parallel
N - Number of processors