Word.ws English Dictionary

Amdahl's law

Amdahl's law proper noun: a formula giving the theoretical speedup in latency of the execution of a task at fixed workload that can be expected of a system whose resources are improved.

Proper noun

Amdahl's law

  1. A formula giving the theoretical speedup in latency of the execution of a task at fixed workload that can be expected of a system whose resources are improved.
    • We can use Amdahl's law to estimate performance improvements when we know the time consumed for some function and its potential speedup.2011, David A. Patterson, John L. Hennessy, Computer Organization and Design: The Hardware/Software Interface, Elsevier, →ISBN, page 52

Origin of Amdahl's law

Named after American computer scientist Gene Amdahl (1922–2015).

Questions about Amdahl's law

What does Amdahl's law mean?
Amdahl's law means a formula giving the theoretical speedup in latency of the execution of a task at fixed workload that can be expected of a system whose resources are improved.
What part of speech is Amdahl's law?
Amdahl's law is a proper noun.

Words near Amdahl's law in the dictionary

  1. Amcits
  2. AMD
  3. AMD64
  4. AMDA
  5. Amdahl
  6. Amdahl's law
  7. Amdahls
  8. Amdang
  9. Amdavad
  10. amdinocillin
  11. Amdo

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: Amdahl's law (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Cite this entry: “Amdahl's law.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/amdahl%27s_law. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.