If you look at the passmark thread performance charts E5 xeons are very low on the list: https://www.cpubenchmark.net/singleThread.html https://www.cpubenchmark

If you look at the passmark thread performance charts E5 xeons are very low on the list: https://www.cpubenchmark.net/singleThread.html https://www.cpubenchmark.net/singleThread.html E3 xeons (which are essentially i7s with ECC) score higher; But if you care about single thread perf then you get an i7-4790k which has been top of the list since 2014. Zero progress has been made since then.