Unfortunately, the more than 6-year old Cortex-A72 cores are really obsolete.
Especially when having many ARM cores, it is desirable to have cores that support at least the ARMv8.2-A ISA, which corrects the initial mistake of the 64-bit ARM ISA of omitting the atomic instructions.
Actually the mistake was corrected in ARMv8.1-A, but all easily available ARM cores support either ARMv8.2-A (Cortex-A55, Cortex-A75 and newer, also NVIDIA Carmel) or ARMv8.0-A (Cortex-A73 and older).
If you want to experiment with many ARM threads and how to organize the synchronization and communication between them, the results on ancient Cortex-A72 cores can be misleading.
Sadly the vast majority of ARM vendors offer only very old ARM cores. Except for the chips intended for mobile phones, the only devices with not too old ARM cores are slow devices with quadruple Cortex-A55 cores.
If you want more threads than that, the best that can be found would be an 8-core NVIDIA Xavier AGX or a 6-core NVIDIA Xavier NX.
An 8-core Xavier might actually have a speed not much different than a 16 core Cortex-A72, even if the NVIDIA cores are relatively slow when compared with more recent ARM cores, i.e. Carmel is a little slower than Cortex-A75.
Buying a Honeycomb lx2 makes sense only when your interest is in the multiple 10G Ethernet and you do not care about what kind of CPU is provided on the board, i.e. you are not interested in the board as a software development platform for future ARM devices.
Sadly the vast majority of ARM vendors offer only very old ARM cores. Except for the chips intended for mobile phones, the only devices with not too old ARM cores are slow devices with quadruple Cortex-A55 cores.
I fear that Asahi Linux on a Mac Mini (especially when the M1X comes out with possibly 6 or 8 high-performance cores) is going to be the best option for a modern Linux ARM workstation for a while.
The largest hurdles in these sorts of projects tend to the GPU and video codecs.
I wish them luck and hope they succeed in entirety, but I can only early adopt so many things. Hopefully Apple doesn't reinvent their GPU every single year.
Especially when having many ARM cores, it is desirable to have cores that support at least the ARMv8.2-A ISA, which corrects the initial mistake of the 64-bit ARM ISA of omitting the atomic instructions.
Actually the mistake was corrected in ARMv8.1-A, but all easily available ARM cores support either ARMv8.2-A (Cortex-A55, Cortex-A75 and newer, also NVIDIA Carmel) or ARMv8.0-A (Cortex-A73 and older).
If you want to experiment with many ARM threads and how to organize the synchronization and communication between them, the results on ancient Cortex-A72 cores can be misleading.
Sadly the vast majority of ARM vendors offer only very old ARM cores. Except for the chips intended for mobile phones, the only devices with not too old ARM cores are slow devices with quadruple Cortex-A55 cores.
If you want more threads than that, the best that can be found would be an 8-core NVIDIA Xavier AGX or a 6-core NVIDIA Xavier NX.
An 8-core Xavier might actually have a speed not much different than a 16 core Cortex-A72, even if the NVIDIA cores are relatively slow when compared with more recent ARM cores, i.e. Carmel is a little slower than Cortex-A75.
Buying a Honeycomb lx2 makes sense only when your interest is in the multiple 10G Ethernet and you do not care about what kind of CPU is provided on the board, i.e. you are not interested in the board as a software development platform for future ARM devices.