The rest is on the GPU
Basically, is the whole article just nonsense? :)
This stinks of a cross between attempting to do PR and having someone who didn't make a spending decision justify it.
As I said elsewhere, the place to improve is in their human workflows, or there is no improvement to get.
1) High-end i7 and Xeon with the same core count hover around the same price. However, Xeon are not made for overclocking whereas the i7 can be overclocked (easily).
2) The application they used for benchmarking relies on high CPU speed. Normally what you find is the more cores a CPU has, the lower their clock speed (I assume to keep it within the TDP).
Also, CPU is all but one price component in a Xeon system:
- The base motherboard would cost the same to a high-end consumer motherboard. If you're looking for dual-CPU motherboard it will cost almost twice as much.
- (Most) Xeon systems will require ECC RAM, which is more expensive than the regular RAM.
However, never ever skimp on motherboard if you're planning to overclock :)
Not having ever wanted to buy a machine for that amount of cash, I'd expect to do better with multi-socket systems.
Anyone care to chime in? I struggled to spend over 1K GBP with my latest machine. (I think 'Extreme Edition' is basically like buying the S version of a car, mind). i7-5820K, 64GB ram.
One thing that does stick out is an odd monitor comparison. There's an expensive color repro "low" (in comparison) res monitor for the PC, against the standard iMac retina. Aren't there cheaper 4K monitors/TV's about?