Yes, workstations have a lot of varying workloads, but they are fundamentally high end desktops because people sit in front of monitors attached to them. The hi

Yes, workstations have a lot of varying workloads, but they are fundamentally high end desktops because people sit in front of monitors attached to them. The high clock rates advantage the single threaded parts of the workload, otherwise one is better off with more lower clocked/efficient cores. Many of the vfx, engineering, etc workloads can (and are) also run as batch jobs on server farms. So, frequently what your looking for is a desktop that can do quick single user trial runs, and then the whole thing is farmed out to the cluster for the final product. But there are also segments (like building code) where the workload actually may have long sections of single threaded work. AKA, the machine burns through a bunch of cores in parallel, then it sits around with a single core linking/packaging/etc (yes I know some build systems can parallelize that too). So again my point is that if all you need are a pile of cores your not looking for a workstation, your looking for a server which is tuned for max throughput across a lot of cores. Frequently this means running more cores in a more energy efficient configuration (lower clocks/etc).