Linus is saying basically the same thing I said in HN comments some time ago. This was regarding the Qualcomm Centriq server processors. I asked where I can buy right now a standard ATX motherboard + CPU combo that I could mess around with at home. For any sort of reasonable price. The answer was deafening crickets.
As compared to how easy it is to buy a decent quality $119 motherboard + $179 AMD Ryzen quad core CPU.
Not just that it was literally impossible to buy a motherboard+cpu for any reasonable price, for a midtower desktop PC format. Also near impossible to buy a 'cheap' 1RU server or similar for any sort of reasonable price, as compared to $400 Dell R620 with two-socket, 8-core-per-socket older Xeons I could buy on eBay.
There is a very real chicken-or-egg problem with economies of scale. If the top ten Taiwanese based motherboard manufacturers don't think it will make money to build boards for it, they just won't. Super low quantity of 'evaluation' boards that you have to 'contact a sales rep' to acquire are not going to gain widespread adoption.
As compared to how easy it is to buy a decent quality $119 motherboard + $179 AMD Ryzen quad core CPU.
Not just that it was literally impossible to buy a motherboard+cpu for any reasonable price, for a midtower desktop PC format. Also near impossible to buy a 'cheap' 1RU server or similar for any sort of reasonable price, as compared to $400 Dell R620 with two-socket, 8-core-per-socket older Xeons I could buy on eBay.
There is a very real chicken-or-egg problem with economies of scale. If the top ten Taiwanese based motherboard manufacturers don't think it will make money to build boards for it, they just won't. Super low quantity of 'evaluation' boards that you have to 'contact a sales rep' to acquire are not going to gain widespread adoption.