Re:The Intel Xeon E7-8800 v3 Review: The POWER8 Killer?
by danieldk on Wednesday May 13, 2015 @09:09AM
(#9538570)
I have a Xeon-based workstation at home, to compensate my relatively weak Mac Mini, mostly for machine learning.
I'd say that normally, you probably don't need it, unless you want ECC memory, large cache sizes, large amounts of memory, etc. (compared to Core i7)
However, they can be very price-effective. Many companies buy workstations for e.g. CAD and replace their machines every 2 or 3 years. Since they are then sold en masse on eBay, you basically get a machine that is still high-end for a bargain price.
E.g., my Xeon workstation was ~400 Euro, has a Xeon E3-1270 that is ~4 times more powerful than my relatively new Mac Mini, comes with an acceptable CUDA-capable GPU, and 12GB memory.
I'd say that normally, you probably don't need it, unless you want ECC memory, large cache sizes, large amounts of memory, etc. (compared to Core i7)
However, they can be very price-effective. Many companies buy workstations for e.g. CAD and replace their machines every 2 or 3 years. Since they are then sold en masse on eBay, you basically get a machine that is still high-end for a bargain price.
E.g., my Xeon workstation was ~400 Euro, has a Xeon E3-1270 that is ~4 times more powerful than my relatively new Mac Mini, comes with an acceptable CUDA-capable GPU, and 12GB memory.