Old Xeon CPUs, especially dual socket ones, just tend to be the highest TDP ones. The Xeon E5-2667 v2 mentioned in the article is a 130W CPU, which he compares to the AMD Ryzen 7 2700X which is 105W. The AMD, in benchmarks is around 5% faster.
I was honestly expecting more of a different there in both speed of the AMD and power consumption of the Xeon. If you get a workstation with two of them, you're talking about 260W max consumption. And of course that is max consumption, idle consumption is probably more important and is probably way, way lower.
One place where some of these machines really shine though is in memory availability. If you need a lot of RAM, it can be hard to get a new desktop that'll take more than 64GB, but workstation chipsets can often go to half a TB or more. Of course, that RAM uses a lot of power...
I have a E5-2670 (V1) based system and the idle power draw is around 80W. I doubt a modern system with the same cores and threads (say an i9-9900k) is going to draw that much less while idle. Even if it uses half the power, that equates to electricity savings of under $5 per month if it's on 24/7.
I was honestly expecting more of a different there in both speed of the AMD and power consumption of the Xeon. If you get a workstation with two of them, you're talking about 260W max consumption. And of course that is max consumption, idle consumption is probably more important and is probably way, way lower.
One place where some of these machines really shine though is in memory availability. If you need a lot of RAM, it can be hard to get a new desktop that'll take more than 64GB, but workstation chipsets can often go to half a TB or more. Of course, that RAM uses a lot of power...