Amdahl's Law

(Named after Gene Amdahl) If F is the fraction of a calculation that is sequential, and (1-F) is the fraction that can be parallelised, then the maximum speedup that can be achieved by using P processors is 1/(F+(1-F)/P).

[Gene Amdahl, "Validity of the Single Processor Approach to Achieving Large-Scale Computing Capabilities", AFIPS Conference Proceedings, (30), pp. 483-485, 1967].