> Datacenters were and still are full of monstrous Xeons, and for a good reason.

To ask the foolish question, why? My guess would be power efficiency. I've only ever seen them in workstations, and in that use-case it was the number of cores that was the main advantage.

It's a compact package with many cores, lots of cache memory, lots or RAM lanes, and lots of PCI lanes. All within a large but manageably hot crystal.

Space and power in datacenters are at a premium; packing so many pretty decent cores into one CPU allows to run a ton of cloud VMs on a physically compact server.

AMD EPYC, by the way, follows the same dtatcenter-oriented pattern.

They seem to gate ECC support behind Xeon for higher end processors. You see ECC memory in a lot of workstation class machines.