One of my friends was saying how her old Mac Pro with dual X5670 CPUs was one of the fastest machines for video transcoding she ever saw. That's a little bit less than ten years old but still older than Sandy Bridge. Someone did the math and it turns out today a top consumer (not HEDT) CPU barely matches this pair of CPUs in multithread performance https://hardforum.com/threads/replacing-dual-x5670.1963388/#... Obvio…
I'm not sure I buy the analysis, for many applications the single threaded performance of a 8700k vs an X5670 is doubled, e.g. ~6000 vs ~2600 in geekbench single threaded. You also can't draw conclusions of single threaded performance from multi-core comparisons due to turbo boost. It's also worth noting that a X5670 cost ~$1400, so you're comparing ~$2800 worth of CPU to ~$350 worth of CPU in something like an 8700k…
In just over a weeks time you will be able to get a 32 core / 64 thread AMD Ryzen Threadripper 2990X [1] for around $1,500-$1,800 which is pretty amazing.
[1] https://wccftech.com/amd-ryzen-threadripper-2990x-2970x-2950...