Amdahl's law

Gives the theoretical overall speedup of a task when only a fraction of it is improved by a factor s. It shows that the unimproved part limits the maximum achievable speedup, and is widely used to estimate the benefit of parallel processing.

S_{\mathrm{latency}}(s)=\frac{1}{(1-p)+\frac{p}{s}}

What the symbols mean

theoretical speedup of the whole task in latency, dimensionless
speedup of the improved part of the task, dimensionless
fraction of the original execution time that benefits from the improvement, between 0 and 1

About this formula

  • FieldComputer science
  • TopicComputer architecture
  • LevelUniversity
  • Also calledAmdahl's argument, speedup of parallel program, maximum speedup from parallelization, parallel speedup formula, Amdahl speedup, theoretical speedup limit
  • SourceWikidata Q460419

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