Amdahl's Law is a formula that identifies potential performance gains from adding additional computing cores to an application that has both serial (nonparallel) and parallel components. If S is the portion of the application that must be performed serially on a system with N processing cores, the formula appears as follows: speed up < 1 (1-5) S+ N assume we have an application that is 75 percent parallel and 25 percent serial. If we run this application on a system with 10 processing cores, we can get a speedup of times.