Bought myself an Ampere Altra system

1341 PLN / 371 USD isn't "cheap" for 25% more cores. That's almost double the price.

Q64-22 on eBay (US) for $150-200 USD / 542-723 PLN.

https://www.ebay.com/itm/365380821650

https://www.ebay.com/itm/365572689742

He clearly refers to that and states they did not respond.

Also, CPU was hardly the biggest cost here.

25% more cores and 36% more clock. It amounts to paying 85% more for 70% more perf. Not too bad.

Those auctions are where we looked at. No answer from seller - probably they did not wanted to deal with sending packages outside of USA.

GHz/MHz wars and ultra-deep pipelines lead to long pipeline stalls and low efficiency. Clock != (IPS) cycle efficiency. What matters is measured performance. There's little point in buying the most expensive option, it's usually throwing money away.

Sometimes though, option are limited but there are also traditional and alternative channel vendors besides secondary markets. For example, a vendor or the mfgr might be willing to sample a part.

When comparing the same design, it absolutely makes sense, because it usually scales. Of course in this case, there's the SRAM which is shared, memory bandwidth, etc. As a rule of thumb: run your own benchmark!