About diferent look on AMD and Intel, I posted that post but it was just a
problem with different Arnold version after all. Fixed that and both AMD
and Intel are rendering same. So no problems there.
As for Xeons.. I made some calculations couple times and for same price of
one dual Xeon 24 threads you can get couple i7 comps... at the end it comes
that you can get twice the power for same money if going with good i7
machines instead of xeons. There is more power supply's and cases needed,
more space for more computers and so on but price difference is huge.
But even that can be solved as any decend computer store should be able to
build custom configuration and put couple i7 MBOs into nice rack and
connect everything in one packed solution for rendering, 4, 10, 20 nodes
per rack...
Or if you get full configurations they are good for any workstation as
well.
In my opinion Xeon solutions gives you maybe 70-80% speed boost for 200%
price increase :) not exact numbers but.
Just throw everything on paper first and see what you get.
Cheers!
