If you're going the scientific computing / HPC server route, then the sky's the limit for core count, you can buy dozens of these and connect them up with Infin

If you're going the scientific computing / HPC server route, then the sky's the limit for core count, you can buy dozens of these and connect them up with Infiniband to run your MPI job or whatever. The point is, the people buying Mac Pros are usually content creators (photography, video editing, music composition, animation etc...) rather than researchers for numerical computation, and for them Mac Pros are probably going to be sufficient enough (unless you are doing 3D animation and need render farms). Most number-crunching scientific code is written only for Linux, you'll never buy a Mac anyway.