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This work was sponsored by ARM itself, though, so it is a bit surprising they didn't supply suitable hardware from one of their licensees (they must have some to do benchmarks themselves).

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PyPy is a little bit of a pathological case of their benchmark suite requires that much DRAM though

SolidRun has a MiniITX board supporting up to 2x32GB for around $1000 [0]. They also have a preproduction units for another board for $550 supporting as much RAM [1].

They probably had their reasons, but I'm just showing what's available.

https://www.solid-run.com/product/SRLX216S00D00GE064C13CH/

https://www.solid-run.com/nxp-lx2160a-family/honeycomb-works...

Why does the benchmark suite need so much RAM ?

I would expect benchmarks to match typical usage, if PyPy can't run in a couple of GB then choose a better language.

Compiling pypy is memory intensive, I don't believe it can be done in 2GB which is where most of the really affordable ARM devices seem to cap out.

You can build OpenJDK with the Hotspot JIT on a 2GB ARM64 system.

But why do you have to compile PyPy on the same machine you’re testing it on?

Well cross-compiling (aka "cross translation) is made complicated because PyPy doesn't use a normal toolchain, but that's not the problem here. The PyPy benchmark suite itself takes that much memory to run.

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