@hipboi without disclosing the SoC nor vendor, I’m wondeing about the price point of the SoC alone. When you compare intel’s N97 and N100, the former just has a 6% higher turbo, 33% more GPU cores, twice the TDP, embedded options available and the rest is the same. The chip sells for $128 vs $55, so they’re clearly segmenting their market. Then if you compare N100-equipped mini PCs to N97 ones, you’ll see that the N100 ones start around $130 while there’s nothing below $230 for the N97.
It doesn’t mean the N97 doesn’t sell, I think it does, and it means that buyers are valuing the difference between the two to pay $100 more. Thus I think that if the SoC of the ROCK6 is very expensive, it’s important that the board provides features (and/or performance levels) that will make buyers compare it favorably to an N97 or above rather than an N100. I know it’s not easy, as N97 and an ARM devices are completely different beasts. That’s also why I think it must really boot on a regular distro out of the box if it’s going to be priced like a powerful small PC.
And if it remains expensive due to the SoC, trimming the board to its minimum could definitely help, including thinking about going the carrier board way from the start maybe, so that the expensive part (RAM+SoC) exists in stock with very few combinations and users decide on the baseboard depending on their choice of eth/pci/usb/hdmi/m2/sata that best matches their use case (probably just 2-3 boards). It also allows to perform incremental updates to certain parts (e.g. power supply, PCIe splitting etc) without having to wait to sell a large pending stock.
