so, I've got a budget of around £2.5k to spend on a machine to do data science on (mostly in clojure w/some R and python) any thoughts on what I should get?

Wait for the new Nvidia GPUs :). I would go with a 16 core AMD Ryzen, but then intel has more optimized MKL operations

Neanderthal 0.34.0 released! The https://twitter.com/hashtag/Clojure?src=hashtag_click matrix library! https://twitter.com/hashtag/Maths?src=hashtag_click https://twitter.com/hashtag/HPC?src=hashtag_click CUDA GPU CPU https://neanderthal.uncomplicate.org