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.
