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Back to the lesson libraryMECHANISM · 12 MIN
M02.7 CONNECT THE MECHANISM

What makes an accelerator useful?

Hire four times the cooks and dinner still isn't four times faster. Discover Amdahl's law, why chips sit idle waiting for data, and why a busy system can still feel slow.

LESSON OVERVIEW12 min lesson

Lesson overview

Hire four times the cooks and dinner still isn't four times faster. Discover Amdahl's law, why chips sit idle waiting for data, and why a busy system can still feel slow.

What you’ll explore

  • Calculate an ideal serial-plus-parallel runtime and identify whether arithmetic, dependencies, or data movement limits a concrete workload.
GO TO THE SOURCE

Original explanations, connected to the research.

NVIDIA CUDA programming guideAmdahl, G. M. (1967). Validity of the single processor approach to achieving large scale computing capabilities. AFIPS Spring Joint Computer Conference.
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