Sometimes, it really is the case that a great new technology doesn't exist until Apple invents it.
On throughput -- compared to my Ryzen 7 Thinkpad, it's getting 1/2 the performance on the DB engine side of things and 1/3rd for the VM. (This is on a single core, I don't have a good bench for multicore performance yet.)
The thing is... the laptop cost ~$3000, and is clocked way higher. The SBC cost ~$200. It's warm to the touch, but not hot. The little DC powerbrick it came with is totally fine, and there's no fan, just a heat sync.
I could stick a dozen of these in a 19" enclosure, and with the right programming have an absolutely awesome amount of computer for the price and power use.
I just wish I could get an ARM workstation-class machine that wasn't a Mac.
:( That's the bit we still don't have right. Apart from a few special cases, we really struggle to use a small number of threads, or a GPU, without enormous amounts of effort - let alone distributed processors.
I'm sure part of the problem is we depend on high levels of backwards compatibility with systems assuming mono-processing ... but I'd like to think there is a way.
Now if someone came up with a really usable and general model for software across distributed processors...