There's also some graph issues here. For example, on the multithreaded one, it takes two seconds on 1 core. Ideal with full use of 6 cores would be (1sec/6~=0.1

There's also some graph issues here. For example, on the multithreaded one, it takes two seconds on 1 core. Ideal with full use of 6 cores would be (1sec/6~=0.167sec). The points at 6-8 cores are clearly above 0.1 seconds and probably below 0.33, but it's hard to tell. Most of the literature in parallel (at least, in the parallel compilers space, where I work) plot speedup (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speedup http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speedup) versus number of processors instead of seconds versus threads/processors to show how well a given algorithm and implementation scale. Of course, you have to be careful about what you use for the sequential (T_1) baseline, but it's much easier to understand the data in the graphs.