Justin Maybe nobody here will understand, but Workstation machines are on another level...at the past laptops were very expensive, just like PCs and were made to last...a 500$ laptop is not a laptop, 1000$ gaming laptop is maybe 20% of a laptop. You see technologies stagnate- people don't need powerful or reliable machines...they need something to browse the web or at most play games...they need it cheaper and better looking with better specs-so stupid technologies for stupid people...technology doesn't progress...quite the opposite- it digresses. The technologies that can be your tools for exploration of the world like telescopes are degradating and becoming more expensive for 100 years now...the same is true for microscopes, long camera lenses for astronomy and so on...only underpowered devices made to emit radiation, spy you and so on are progressing...GPUs too because they are for better graphics, thus better illusion of the matrix. CPUs are now with more cores, but don't worry- it's for the sake of spying you and sending everything about you in the background.
You would think that at least computers advance, but that can't be further from the truth- if you check the difference between Xeon CPUs and mainstream Intel ones you would see that in the past there were LGA775 and LGA771 platforms where with a few adjustments you could use Xeon CPU on a civil platform...but even then the higher class was much better- XEON CPUs have Intel Demand Dased Switching which basically gives only as much power to the CPU as needed- thus making this big, bulky machines consume less power than the mainstream i5! They are also more stable and cold.
XEONs use much faster QPI bus type than the i7s DMI...so I don't care how good your stupid synthetic benchmarks are- try working with a true Workstation machine and you will see that no matter how old it will still crash stupid i7 CPUs!
XEONs also have much more cache memory, can work in dual CPU motherboards, and work with more than a 1TB of RAM! And with every generation high end Xeon are getting further from the mainstream CPUs.
But it's not all the CPU- just the class is important- modern computers are like Lamborghini: they can run with 300km, but only carry 2 people...on the other hand there are trains- slower but can transport hundreds of people- while Lambo can transport 6 people before the train arrives, when that happen much more work is done with the train at much lower cost and it's much more reliable! If you don't have big capacity and don't have demanding work Lambo is better for you, but it's nothing compared to the train 🙂
That's why Workstations are the best 🙂