Is it possible to run a solana light/thin client on a personal machine (<8 cores) to get access to the RPC API?
The docs make it clear that it's possible to run a full node, but this does not work for connecting to mainnet-beta.
At the time of writing, there's no full validator node that can run on a smaller machine against mainnet-beta. There are high requirements in order to keep up with the throughput with the network.
You can run a local test validator with solana-test-validator to try out the rpcs locally. But nothing to match mainnet-beta with a small machine today.