The more fundamental reason is Amdahl's law
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amdahl%27s_law
Even a tiny bit of serial instruction will limit the speed up
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amdahl%27s_law
Even a tiny bit of serial instruction will limit the speed up
Every doubling of the number of workers halves the execution time cleanly in the plot, from 40 seconds to 20 seconds to 10 seconds. Eyeballing this for 32 over 16 workers is difficult, but it still seems close to halving the total time once again. So there's not a lot of Amdahl flattening, it's just the plain physics of looking at a inverse-proportional curve.