FYI: superlinear speedups in GROMACS (fwd)

[Mark Hahn]

> Sure, and I do believe there are commodity chips with larger L2 caches, too.

they suck.
you're referring to Intel Xeon CPUs with 1 or 2M cache;
next time you're looking at the specs on them, take a look
at their clock frequencies, and especially the speed of 
their external interface.  as I recall, they sit on a PC100
bus, which is about 3 generations obsolete.  ie, .45 GB/s
versus 2-3 GB/s for current systems.

their suckiness extends to their ridiculous price, as well,
which to me means they can't be considered "commodity".