okcnaline,
The world of workstation components can be frustrating, because the gaming / consumer equivalents have btter performance in certain ways but are significantly less expensive. For example, NVIDIA released the Quadro K6000 GPU with 2880 CUDA cores and the same processor as the 6GB Titan, but with 12GB of RAM and costs $5,000 to the Titan's $1,000. Now there is a new 7-series GTX with two processors like a GTX 690, 5,600 cores, the 12GB, so it's a double Titan one chassis, but at $3,000. Of course, it's a strange economy- two Titans for the price of three but still $2,000 less than one K6000.
Xeon E3's are the working version of i5, except E3's are hyperthreading. They typically have very healthy clock speeds and are economical. I tend to favor Xeon E5's because the memory bandwidth is more than doubled (56 to 25), there can be 40 PCIe lanes to E3's 16, and LGA 2100 means the ability to use 6, 8 , or 10 cores.
With Xeons, the 1600-series which are high performers for l a cost similar or less than i7 are used in systems like Dell Precision T3610 and HP z420, but not widely promoted for individual builders. There are a lot of components not available on Partpicker. It's possible Intel wants to focus on the expensive ones (surprised!), but there may be other factors having to do with the fewer blanks that meet Xeon specification.
I've read that all LGA2011 CPU's are eight core and capable of dual CPU, but are bin selected to be 4, six,or 8 cores, for speed, and whether the dual CPU feature is enabled- so all the chip begin equally, but some become high core count, faster ones.
Still, it's frustrating. I thought of building a dual 6-core Xeon E5-2643 v2 system and Intel lists the bin price at $1,552 each, but they are not available anywhere for less than $2,100, and up to $2,800. That's not only a lot, it's as much or more than an E5-2687W v2, which is the same clock speed but 8-cores!
Good discussion. Strange world.
Cheers,
Bambiboom
Facebook
Twitter
Instagram