My personal opinion is that the SoC business is stuck in a chicken and egg scenario where there will be no sense to sell to small players because there's no com

My personal opinion is that the SoC business is stuck in a chicken and egg scenario where there will be no sense to sell to small players because there's no common ecosystem to leverage (and thus SoC sales will come with heavy support costs) but there's no incentive to create a PC-like standard since it is not a commodity market like x86 chips and motherboards are. Currently selling a small batch of chips (even individual ones) to someone makes no sense because the customer would be unable to do anything with the chip simply because they wouldn't know how it works without support or documentation (which costs money to create and maintain). The small players market (all of them, combined) is not worth enough money to put the effort in. We can argue about the PR value (among geeks) but that's not deemed valuable by management at this point. It's certainly not about ignoring or setting price points to exclude little guys, it's about running a business for profit. If and when we get some kind of a standard for SoCs and it becomes viable that you can build a motherboard and put any ARM SoC in it, it will also become sensible to sell them like commodity products but the industry as a whole is not at that stage. As there is very fierce competition among the individual SoC manufacturers and very little co-operation takes place, I think that ARMH is pretty much the only ones in the position to make any such development. I don't like the way the industry works at the moment but that's just the way it is. Maybe it will some day mature and stabilize.