Going back on topic, I had all thise to say about why, in particular, the Pentium 4 sucks up bandwidth like no tomorrow.

The basic point: the large line-size boosts FPU performance, and other streaming type applicationsn, and the excess bandwidth helps a great deal; however, in integer tasks, especially code that "jumps" a lot, the large line-sizes hurt. Thus massive bandwidth is needed to act as damage control.

Of course, read the above for a more thorough discussion.

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A mathematician is a device for turning coffee into theorems -- P. Erdos