Mac benchmarks: iMacs vs older Mac Pro towers

I've been having a great discussion in a PPro Facebook group regarding new editing systems; I have a limited budget for 3 new Macs in our company and I feel confident about purchasing a new Mac Pro (for PPro, AE, color correction and finishing work) and 2 iMacs with Thunderbolt RAIDs (just for editing with PPro).
I'm curious though: when I look at the Geekbench scores for the latest Mac models there are older Mac Pros (2009 - 2013) that seem to outperform the newest iMacs in 64-bit multicore performance. The single core performance has the iMacs coming out on top (I'm only looking at the 27" retina, not the new 5K model). So which score is more indicative of performance while editing with Premiere Pro? I've heard from editors who say their new iMacs run circles around the older towers they replaced so I'm inclined to believe that a new iMac would feel faster than even the last silver Mac Pro tower (2012); but a 12-core beast with a beefy GPU has got to be a serious contender when it comes to intense multiprocessing tasks.
I know that there a lot of factors that determine overall "speed" (GPU, RAM, storage speed) so it won't always be an easy 1:1 comparison with these models. I just want to make sure I'm investing in the right hardware and very curious as to how these benchmarks translate into real world Premiere Pro performance.
TIA,
JVK

jvknowles wrote:
I'm inclined to believe that a new iMac would feel faster than even the last silver Mac Pro tower (2012); but a 12-core beast with a beefy GPU has got to be a serious contender when it comes to intense multiprocessing tasks.
There's a lot involved in this comparison, such as:
CPU core count and speed
GPU capacity
Storage speed
The old Mac Pros are excellent rigs, but limited to SATA2 storage speeds, and their Xeons don't have Intel's AVX available, which will speed things up a bit.  One advantage they do have is an open catalog of AMD or nVidia GPUs, assuming you can get them powered by the internal connectors.  The new Pros are AMD-only, though the advantage is that they have 2 GPUs versus 1.
Comparatively, the new iMac with its desktop Core i7 processor will be able to push faster GHz, and it also has Intel's QuickSync tech available (hardware h.264 encoding).  So if you're doing a lot of output with h.264, you'll see a bit of a kick in the *** with those.  The limitations?  The GPUs aren't as capable as the ones in the nMP now.  And you only have access to a single GPU, where the new Pro has 2.  But, if you're not doing any work that can be off-loaded to the GPUs, it won't matter.
As Eric mentions: AE is all CPU, all the time.  It wants cores and GHz.  It'll make your machine cry, regardless of what it is.

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