Forget the cute but tiny Pi 3B+ running at a mere 1.4GHz with a puny 1Gb RAM. Feast your eyes upon the mighty Cavium ThunderX machine from avantek.co.uk
Whilst it is very configurable, a nice basic developer machine with a single 32-core v8 1.6GHz CPU, 32Gb RAM, half-gig SSD, Gb ethernet, FirePro graphics etc is a mere GBP 1850 - call it US$2500. For a comparison that's what ParcPlace paid in 1994 to get me a 70MHz ARM710 workstation with a colossal 4Mb ram.

Or of course you could go for the US18000 dual-32-core 2.2GHz etc version, but that's possibly going a bit over the top. The 384-core server model is definitely a bit much :-) Or is it?

At a fairly wild guess based on benchmark comparisons for other languages, I suspect each core would probably run Squeak about as fast as a ~2.5Hz intel i7. So, somebody wanting a fast 64-bit ARM VM should really consider the possibilities ...

tim
--
tim Rowledge; tim at rowledge.org; http://www.rowledge.org/tim
Oxymorons: Advanced BASIC