If someone gave me one for free, I'd totally make it my daily driver. I don't do much AI, but I always wanted to have a machine with lots of puny cores since the Xeon Phi appeared.

The justification is that processors cores aren't getting much faster, but what they are is getting more numerous - entry-level machines have between 4 and 8 cores - and adapting code to run across multiple cores is important if we want to utilise all those cores.

anybody writing single core code in 2025 professionally isn't very professional..

the core count doesn't matter. a top of the line Turin system has less than 1.4TB/s memory for the whole dual CPU system. A 2020 era A100 has 2TB/s.