I dunno, I kept working on projects and at shops that had an Aarch64 deployment scenario that ended up involving cross compilation anyways. Either in the cloud in docker images on Aarch64 VPS, or on SBC for embedded systems. To me it was partially about eating my own dog food to have an ARM workstation without giving up Linux. And to have a giant amount of RAM and high speed networking at the same time.

Also a chance to learn some of the serving stack for inference.

In the end, it's worked out. It is power efficient, it shipped with a vendor supported Ubuntu. I can run Qwen 3.6 27b reasonably well on it. And it basically does everything I need applications wise.

It's also small and convenient enough I can toss it in a backpack and take it with me on trips when I'm staying at my elderly parents, just needing monitor/keyboard/mouse.

A laptop with same chipset would be nice but has its own downsides.

It wasn't super badly priced when I bought it back in December. It was high, but not insane. It's memory and storage prices that have spiked it. Remember the thing has 128GB of RAM. If you spec a Mac out with the same quantity, it will be in the same price range.

Certainly way cheaper than a Ampere system like the author here is talking about. I actually looked into building such a system and ... it feels weird to gripe about DGX Spark prices when building out a system like that. The Altra requires ECC RAM (though DDR4 at least). Have fun kitting that out.

Those systems were built for highly highly concurrent multicore server (or some workstation) loads. Meant to be carved up into multiple virtual machines, really. I have plenty of applications that would do well on a machine like that, but playing YouTube videos etc is not one of them.