So you’re saying that the current Minecraft servers are all running on desktop hardware and not on standard U-chassis servers in racks in data centers?

If anything I’d expect them. To run virtualized on standard rack servers.

Something here doesn’t add up. I don’t buy that enterprise server hardware that can out-perform desktop hardware by orders of magnitude can’t do what you need - especially since that’s surely how the existing servers run.

If this single-threading performance is really en issue, run some kind of virtualization on a rack server, build a VM with the exact hardware config you need, and the host hardware will make it happen (which I’d bet is exactly how current servers are run, because then they can be moved/Load balanced dynamically without missing a beat).

I currently have both single-core, single-cpu VM’s and multi-core, multi-cpu VM’s running on the same host for test purposes. The VM has no idea it’s virtual hardware is actually run on a different multi-cpu/core host.

Check out xcp-ng - it’s probably the best (arguable) open source virtualization platform today. VMware server can definitely do this, if you have a license.