If I had to guess, edge compute for networks of far less powerful IoT devices.
Vehicles, industrial control.
Neither seems to ned 80 cores?
Idk for most safety-critical stuff you'll run a realtime OS, and all important sensor polls will be pinned to a core. I assume industrial controls could have 40-or-so sensors that you would want to minimize latency for because if you miss a reading the possibility of something breaking/someone dying opens up.
Something like this isn't being used for that kind of realtime control, the memory hierarchy is too hard to nail down in a way that doesn't negate dedicating cores to tasks. It's probably meant for 'embedded' applications like storage appliances.
GM uses it in the Cruise Origin autonomous robotaxis.
Do they use the cores to babysit sensors, or as general compute?
Judging from that, like I said not using the cores to babysit individual sensors using hardware separation of many cores to simplify hard real time constraints, but instead as a block of general compute.
If you think of a modern car as a miniature data center on wheels you wouldn't be too far off, and cars aren't the only vehicles.
I think maybe they just want to handle small API requests for many millions of devices at once.