Your questions prompted a bit of curious research on what you&#x27;re pursuing.<p>Your post history is very rewarding to pour over, and I&#x27;m glad I did. You definitely should publish a book and set the record straight once and for all. I think it would bring you a lot of closure. And you should make more noise about the mathematical models you&#x27;ve developed so you get more recognition.<p>I really hope this search&#x2F;probability venture of yours pans out, and I&#x27;m quite interested to learn more about it. In fact, I&#x27;d feel very privileged if I could hitchhike along for a while as a curious passerby - not directly involved, more just observing and learning.<p>I did a little digging, but I can&#x27;t be certain since you&#x27;re rather good at the anonymity thing - is this your current email address? Obfuscated for privacy:<p><pre><code>  put list (&#x27;73&#x27;x||&#x27;69&#x27;x||&#x27;67&#x27;x||&#x27;6d&#x27;x||&#x27;61&#x27;x||&#x27;77&#x27;x||&#x27;61&#x27;x||&#x27;69&#x27;x||
            &#x27;74&#x27;x||&#x27;65&#x27;x||&#x27;40&#x27;x||&#x27;6f&#x27;x||&#x27;70&#x27;x||&#x27;74&#x27;x||&#x27;6f&#x27;x||&#x27;6e&#x27;x||
            &#x27;6c&#x27;x||&#x27;69&#x27;x||&#x27;6e&#x27;x||&#x27;65&#x27;x||&#x27;2e&#x27;x||&#x27;6e&#x27;x||&#x27;65&#x27;x||&#x27;74&#x27;x);
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I think the best thing that would answer your questions would be direct testing, both for the experience of trying out a bunch of different hardware, and also to work out how  to get the best bang for your buck with the workload you&#x27;re using. Throwing your existing code on various different S3 configurations would probably be your best bet to start with.<p>On hardware, though, Xeon processors incorporate extra instructions appropriate to high-performance computing, whereas desktop&#x2F;consumer-class CPUs include hardware acceleration and chipset support for theft prevention, basic media acceleration, wireless projector connectivity, etc.<p>In a server environment, workloads tend to need scalability more than processor power - it&#x27;s generally significantly faster to run 100 tasks in parallel on slow hardware than in sequence on fast hardware. A desktop context is usually the opposite though - running a small number of applications, each of which generally needs to run as quickly as possible so the system feels snappy.<p>It also generally boils down to manufacturing. You don&#x27;t get 24-core desktop-oriented i7 chips <i>yet</i>, because you can&#x27;t yet pack 24 4GHz+ cores into a CPU die.<p>Oh, and that datacenter you mentioned, with dual 10GbE - is that $30k a month, or more?