Wikidata facts
- Instance of
- formula
- Named after
- Gene Amdahl
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- Amdahl's law
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- WikiProject Mathematics
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Encyclopedic overview
Amdahl's law demonstrates the theoretical maximum speedup of an overall system and the concept of diminishing returns. Plotted here is logarithmic parallelization vs linear speedup. If exactly 50% of the work can be parallelized, the best possible speedup is 2 times. If 95% of the work can be parallelized, the best possible speedup is 20 times. According to the law, even with an infinite number of processors, the speedup is constrained by the unparallelizable portion.
In computer architecture, Amdahl's law (or Amdahl's argument) is a formula limiting the speedup of a task as resources are added to the system executing that task.
Excerpted from Wikipedia’s “Amdahl's law” article, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.