Getting back at this discussion.
YES! XEON IS GOOD!
But only by price performance if u buy old platforms
If u look at the benchmarks
http://www.cpubenchmark.net/multi_cpu.html for dual cpu and
http://www.cpubenchmark.net/high_end_cpus.html
for single cpu, u can see that the difference is not 2x increase but 1.5 x
for single cpu the xeons outperform i7 cpu. This has mostly to do with corecount. The i7 would win in speed per core.
Of course the benchmarks dont say a thing about specific usage.
Using a daw u aint getting any benefit from hypertreading so a
Intel Xeon E5-2699 v4 with a possible 44 threads wil only do 22.
The benchmarks use hypertreading so u cant figure out the dawbench performance.
still lets look at the performance according the cpubenchmarks
If we look at for instance a sytem like dual xeon x5690 it would score 14,295
The dual Xeon E5-2699 v4 does 38,461 that's ca 2.7 x more performance.
The dual xeon does 24 threads and the e5 88 thats 3.6 x more threads. As u can see more threads doesnt pair with performance.
If u do some math and look at price performance u will see the e5 system would cost u about 18 x more than the old x5690
The x5690 is the top of the old xeons if u would buy the slower one's price drops dramaticly while price performance would increase dramaticly.
If we look at price performance you would see that a i7 6850 K would do almost the same performance as the 2x xeon x5690 but would cost 100 dollar more.
Of course its new and the xeon second hand.
The performance is almost the same with hyperthreading on. I asume with hyperthreading off the 2x xeon would win course its 12 against 6 cores. It wouldnt win that much though.
As said before double the core dont give you double the performance its about 1.5 x
Ok somuch for the cpu for itself. The real benefit of the xeons is expandability. U can put more memory on a board and even put a second cpu on it.
In my opinion this is only intresting if u focus on old platforms. Pricewise upgrading new xeon systems would cost to much for the performance u gaining.
I guess that with the old systems using xeons would give u much more headroom in gaining performance for a small budget. Compare to the I7
Now for audio use having a fast multicore proccessor is one thing, the soundcard is even more important in my opinion.
Testing around with reason 9.1 stresstest with diferent audiocards shows me the importance of the audiocard.
the difference could be 100 % of improvement.
As Budweiser says
The very best recording and mixing/mastering environments are hardware based studios
A soundcard is also hardware. If u could buy a 22 core xeon u could buy a top of the line soundcard to.
I have to say building a sytem and choose the components has a lot to do with how u want to work.
I would say for liveperformance my investments are much bigger than for studiowork becourse i would need very low latency and dont want any crackling or popping sounds. So investing in hardware is almost evry time the best solution.
In my case i use reason 9 as a instrument chancing incoming audio in beats or harmony's. If i would do the same thing with hardware i would have need lots of money and lots of time to patch.
For studio work Budweiser is right, with enough hardware u can do a lot of channels dynamics fx etc on the same time what gives the option to tweak everything realtime.
At a home studio u can do the same production but u have to bounce tracks everytime what makes it tricky if u want to change something after.
Still u can make a good production on a laptop with a cheap soundcard.
I think in the near future Budweiser has to get back at making the point
The very best recording and mixing/mastering environments are hardware based studios
Even hardware is softwarebased just like Sonic core is programmed dsp.
The gamechanger gonna be audio over lan reducing latency and making it possible to gain cpu power real easy by chaining computers and hardware.
With this it isnt necessary to have the fastest computer and be capped to its limits. U dont have caps in trackcount or have to bounce tracks to reduce proccesor load. U could tweak every track eq, dynamics etc and patch all with just a few cat cables.