Yes really. I've a dual 2.4ghz Xeon (32 cores) with 128GB RAM and dual Titan Blacks. The RAM and second Titan are the best things about it.
Single core ops are the pits (3% CPU usage, think about that) unless you have a lot of other things to do in the background in which case it can be a blessing - but not really a $4k blessing (a second i7 would be handier if you have space). A LOT of things (inc in Houdini) are still single core.
I'm doing different work to what I was doing back when I bought that machine (I just work on an i7 now as I moved overseas, old box is on a shelf at my parent's). I found GPU accel sims were a beautiful thing but not all sims are OpenCL accelerated so even that's a juggling act. Forget Tesla, get Titans or Ti's and RAM, both system and GPU. Excess system RAM has saved my skin more than anything else during pinch points over the years.
>>> and quadro4000+tesla k40 in"
>>> Quadro and Tesla are BAD choice for Redshift.
>>> Price vs performance is really really bad.
>>>>> will not kill your budget.
>>>>> And any i7 with 40 PCI lanes is good to handle 4 GPUs without issues.
>>>>> be worse for Redshift.
>>>>> then multi core slower speeds as you already pointed out.
>>>>> benefits are there from i7 compared to Xeons.
>>>>> for price of two of them you can get i7 and couple great GPUs.
>>>>>> I think it also depends if you're using other programes as well.
>>>>>> Don't know how well houdini scales with multicore etc.
>>>>>> But as for price it isn't that much cheaper.
>>>>>> this is a little list i created some weeks ago for our new ws.
>>>>>> core i7 is out of order.
>>>>>> And even the 8 core is close to 2x dual xeon.
>>>>>>> But I'm still not fixed on the CPU.
>>>>>>> the price grows a lot if I take faster xeon.
>>>>>>> So I'm thinking of a fast i7 instead.
>>>>>>> What's your opinion ?
>>>>>>>> The debate is still the same.
>>>>>>>> But I'm still not fixed on the CPU.
>>>>> Need to find freelancers fast?
>>>>> Need some help with rendering an Redshift project?
>>> Need to find freelancers fast?
>>> Need some help with rendering an Redshift project?