Xeons are relevant to HPC because they (together with supporting components e.g. chipset, motherboard, RAM) are designed to scale.
This motherboard supports four Xeon CPUs and a ridiculous amount of RAM. You can't do that with i7 CPUs!
Среди различных спецификаций для Xeon, доступных здесь, http://ark.intel.com/compare/87720,84679, какие аспекты делают его актуальным для HPC?
Базовая частота процессора меньше, чем у Core i7. Почему Xeon не достиг той же производительности, и почему это не является недостатком для HPC?
Xeons are relevant to HPC because they (together with supporting components e.g. chipset, motherboard, RAM) are designed to scale.
This motherboard supports four Xeon CPUs and a ridiculous amount of RAM. You can't do that with i7 CPUs!
There are various architectural features in Server Class processors that are critical for performance and the CPU frequency is just one aspect in that.
A quick comparison on Intel ark gives us the high level overview.
Ultimately an architect has to tune the system to suit its needs, these advantages on the server front is weighed against other features on the desktop front like the support for Graphics.