The thing that surprised me most is that on my colleague's system (the second Arch x64 one), the estimator went up to 16 cores before dropping back to 14, while

The thing that surprised me most is that on my colleague's system (the second Arch x64 one), the estimator went up to 16 cores before dropping back to 14, while my own system (Mint 14) and the other Arch system both went to 8, then back to 6.