Also, given that this was on 2014-ish hardware, 2Ghz/8Core sounds a lot like a Xeon L. A high-powered Xeon or something like an i7 could've probably already don

Also, given that this was on 2014-ish hardware, 2Ghz/8Core sounds a lot like a Xeon L. A high-powered Xeon or something like an i7 could've probably already done a lot better simply because of raw single core performance. So these numbers definitely sound reasonable.