Performance isn’t there. Why spend 3k+ on this?
Ampere Altra on Windows: ca. 800 (1C) ca. 12800 (80C) https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/20639458
Ampere Altra on Linux: ca. 900 (1C) ca. 44000 (80C) https://www.tomshardware.com/news/ampere-altra-max-80-ccore-...
Apparently the key to getting performance out of the Ampere Altra is … to just not use Windows? And have a very parallel workload. Yes, a single Altra core is half as fast as a single M1 Ultra core. But it really depends on your use case and other factors (e.g. power efficiency) which one is preferable.
And that’s Apple’s chip from 2 years ago!
Core for core this is a dog.
Neoverse N1 is hardly a dog. It’s a decent enough core in a server processor that has 80 of them.
Altra is not intended to compete core for core with any laptop/desktop/workstation processor.
Buying mac hardware for a linux workstation is madness.
But yes, if by workstation you mean shiny then sure!