Let\'s say I have a 4-core CPU, and I want to run some process in the minimum amount of time. The process is ideally parallelizable, so I can run chunks of it on an infinite
The answer depends on the complexity of the algorithms used in the program. I came up with a method to calculate the optimal number of threads by making two measurements of processing times Tn and Tm for two arbitrary number of threads ‘n’ and ‘m’. For linear algorithms, the optimal number of threads will be N = sqrt ( (mn(Tm*(n-1) – Tn*(m-1)))/(nTn-mTm) ) .
Please read my article regarding calculations of the optimal number for various algorithms: pavelkazenin.wordpress.com