Amdahl's Law is often conflated with the law of diminishing returns, which is a rather popular concept in economics. However, the law of diminishing returns is only a special case of applying Amdahl's Law, depending on the order of improvement. If the order of separate tasks in the program is chosen to be improved in an optimal way, a monotonically decreasing improvement in execution time will be observed, demonstrating diminishing returns. An optimal method indicates first applying those improvements that will result in the greatest speedups, and leaving those improvements yielding smaller speedups for later.

Now, if we were to reverse this sequence for choosing resources, in which we improve less optimal components of our program before more optimal components, the speedup achieved through the...