Am into rendering, have e5-2665's ES at the moment with 64gb ram which is fine for 'cough' more than enough for most day to day tasks like watching 4k (gpu dependent), normal non-heavy Adobe rendering in premiere, AE, etc.
Don't know about matlab, depends on how heavily CPU dependent it is? Games, all about GPU these days, don't sweat it, just cough up for gtx 1080 ti, and you should be good up to 4k. My guess..no change by switching out cpu's in gaming..probably worse. Games like fewer threads and higher frequency (like adobe). Build a cheap gaming pc for 1/10th price of cpu upgrade, and spend monies on GPU.
My prob is, rendering engines like vray, Arnold, renderman etc..wow they like cores, and the difference between your 2670 or my 2665 ES Sandy Bridge Xeon V1 and the current top-of-the line e5-2699 v4...well I get 1550 on Cinebench R2 with my two old cpu's. Current 2699 v4's get around..5200 +/- (a lot!). I just picked up the two older gen e5-2696 v3's which average around 4200. Ray-tracing basically, in 3d programs. So the difference is in say a 30 second scene, with 24 fps, 720 frames, and iff each frame takes say 5 minutes on my current setup for a really good final render....do the math...
For say a 30 second scene in Vray everything maxed out, 5 minutes per frame for 1080p..not even going to touch 4k here...
5 minutes per frame * 720 = 3600 minutes or 60 hours or 2.5 days with e5-2665
with e5-2696 v3 roughly (4200/1550)=roughly 2.71 x faster. Or (sorry very rough maths! 3600/2.71)= 1328 minutes or 22.1 hrs.
e5-2699 v4 roughly (5200?/1550)= 3.35x faster or for same scene...or 3600/3.35)= 1074 minutes or 18 hours.
So if you screw up your scene, and have to re-render...well big big difference between 2+days and less than a day! This is assuming final output quality tho, and as a rule, when rendering, ALWAYS render frame-by-frame so that if there is a colossal co!up! or crash you just have to go back to render from the last good known frame. Now why can't adobe do this? See previous epithet..and as a rule, Maya, 3DS Max, WILL CRASH when rendering mid-way through....or just crash for the fun of it.
Uhhm having a few beers so can't remember the old maths too well (studied finance for 8 years! but now couldn't integrate to save my life!), but for certain things, yes we need lots and lots more cores (like 3d rendering). Matlab..not too sure. Gaming, definitely not. Never got into matlab, learning spss and Bloomberg terminals was more than enough!
Sorry got excited there, someone else can comment more knowledgeably on Matlab and Python..but for the life of me can't see matlab being that CPU intensive? Unless you're solving to some nth degree some unsolveable equation in which case you need a supercomputer?
