Amdahl's law
The part of a job that can't be split up limits how much faster more cores can make it.
Amdahl's law bounds speed-up on N processors by 1 / ((1 - p) + p / N), where p is the fraction of the work that can run in parallel.
Examples
If 20% of a job has to run on one core, even unlimited cores can make it at most 5 times faster.
See also