Wouldn't this be relatively easy to test with a benchmark? Apple's ARM processors are pretty fast, especially for single-core stuff. Most data-center processors

Wouldn't this be relatively easy to test with a benchmark? Apple's ARM processors are pretty fast, especially for single-core stuff. Most data-center processors are designed for lots of cores at the cost of single-core performance. Plus, if you're using an x86 processor, you'll need to be translating ARM to x86 which is going to come at a big cost. To get plausible Mac mini benchmarks on the fastest x86 processor, you'd need overhead to be less than 25%. Plus, you'd be buying a $650 x86 processor instead of spending $600 on a Mac mini. You'd also need to think about power. That x86 processor draws 150W base and 253W peak compared to an M1 Mac mini which hits a peak of 39W. Even if you're getting pretty cheap power (5-cents per kWh), that's still $44/year in extra costs. I've used QEMU on Github's x86 runners to run Linux-ARM and it's painfully slow. It seems like it would be hard to make the economics work out well while still offering a plausible experience speed-wise.