[OneOneOneOne]

In their situation I think processing time is the bottleneck or at least a major factor. They probably see every penny back in productivity gains.

[stegosaurus]

I'm sure. Are Xeon systems just super expensive, though? Is 8 cores the best you can do for 4K?

[hhandoko]

The CPU gets progressively expensive; and yes, more than 8 cores will probably blow the $4k budget. However, two things to note:

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.