Most people I know, including myself, are quite happy on a 6-7 year old unit.
Bar developers, graphic artists (2d,3d), video, mega-data there's sod all use for a 12 core Xeon. Don't start spewing gaming either as the Xbox one doesn't have a 12 core Xeon in it!
I'm getting a 12 core asap, but eager for more compute-focused options.
Edit: it seems like I read about certain algorithms that could perform calculations without direct knowledge of the underlying data, but I can't find a link. It only worked for a specific class of problems in any case.
My intuition has us going back to the dumb terminal mode, albeit with a very fancy screen.