A few bits here:
- I think the few hundred total is correct. I think $300-400 may be a bit high. Take the A2SDI-4C-HLN4F as an example where the entire board sells at retail for under $270. List on the C3558 is $86 which means sub $200 for the board in that example.
- Most of these products are not meant to be bought on NewEgg/ Amazon. You are likely spending more to get one off parts from an etailer. They also move so slowly that vendors have trouble stocking them at Amazon.
- I do think that part of the pricing formula is a markup on COGS.
- Volume on these embedded parts tends to be lower than mainstream server platforms. There are other vendors I know out there doing runs of 200-500 boards at a time only.
Single die EPYC 3251 has lower component coats coats than dual die. Fewer PCIe, NIC, and RAM slots need to be placed as an example. I think that you could see a $600 ish board with the CPU if there is a customer with a decent volume OEM'ing the platform. The flip side is that someone needs to invest in all of the BIOS, firmware, and software validation work for the AMD platforms. Even if it is not much, spread over low volumes it adds up.