I would love to hear the reasons for your conclusion. Why do you think anything other than a Mac Pro is a better solution? I suppose it depends what your doing but Matlab and R both using GPUs now. The Mac Pro has great thermal characteristics. What's the issue? Just don't like Apple?
I find it odd that someone would make such a bold claim about something they also say they know nothing about.
It's not a terribly bold claim. I think Apple makes some brilliant designs, and I'm very impressed with their engineering.
But if compute is that important to you, I'd imagine getting access to a more modular, scalable supercomputer will probably be more efficient.
The Mac Pro is not designed to be a scalable platform. It is indeed very good at what it is designed for, but my claim is merely that it doesn't seem to be a very good fit if you're running calculations that take days to finish.
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Which Xeon and which i7 did you compare? A desktop quad Haswell i7 beat the s*** out of quad Xeon E5 for less dollars.
Xeon is a huge markup from Intel, simple as that. For multithreading, sure a single hex Xeon would kill an i7 though not by much. But for what it's worth, I'll stick with i7.
So, I don't really know what do you mean by "i7 is no match for a Xeon", seriously? You maybe fed up by the brand? Xeon indeed sounds more cool and techy. Doesn't mean it's a lot better, though.
Guys, just read the damn article. Anand provides a pretty good analysis of the differences LATER in the article.
If you need serious multi-thread, or series graphics capability, IB-E is the way to go, despite the fact that it is a generation design. The key is the 40 PCIe lanes.
Also, "kill an i7, though not by much" just sounds like an oxymoron.
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Brace yourself, blather about cache size, memory protection and ECC RAM is coming to try and make a Quad Xeon CPU that benches lower than a Quad i7 still be the better option when all people care about is how much CPU power they're getting over their current system 😀
Cache size can indeed be important is certain situations, as can ECC RAM.
The bigger deal you're missing is simply the increased number of PCIe lanes coming off the CPU.
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what's the point of comparing hackintoshes and real mac pro ? 🙄
spending XXXX dollars to install a hacked version of OSX while OSX runs smoothly and has frequent updates on genuine hardware is really futile
I wouldn't call it futile, but you're right, it doesn't really make sense to compare the two.
