Look up speedup in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.
In computer architecture, speedup is a number that measures the relative performance of two systems processing the same problem. More technically, it is the improvement in speed of execution of a task executed on two similar architectures with different resources. The notion of speedup was established by Amdahl's law, which was particularly focused on parallel processing. However, speedup can be used more generally to show the effect on performance after any resource enhancement.