I just retired my (4,1) updated to (5,1), W3680, SSD in favor of a Ryzen 2700X build, and I hadn't planned on doing it until next year. (A confluence of unexpected events brought in the 2700X early.) With the somewhat faster Westmere CPU, enough RAM (24GB) and SSD, it was entirely usable as a software development machine.
I listed it for sale, but fortunately nobody local wanted it and I'm not about to ship it. So it's still in the back basement doing secondary duty running linux as a hadoop cluster name node.
The moral is that the cMP's can be made to be perfectly usable machines with a relative minimum of expenditure. I don't know that I would advise just anyone to get one, but if you're already leaning that way, go for it.
I listed it for sale, but fortunately nobody local wanted it and I'm not about to ship it. So it's still in the back basement doing secondary duty running linux as a hadoop cluster name node.
The moral is that the cMP's can be made to be perfectly usable machines with a relative minimum of expenditure. I don't know that I would advise just anyone to get one, but if you're already leaning that way, go for it.