how to make it run?

[KRT]

Even with the SOEdge baseboard, still would not boot? Maybe defective?

Confirmed.  The baseboard did not help at all. 

The part that I could not figure out at all was the "image" provided on the wiki (as well as the resulting image when I used the SDK to build one from source) was not like any other SBC image that I have ever seen.  I tried various methods of writing them onto SD cards and eMMC modules.  No matter what I tried, the resulting image (now on an SD card or eMMC module) did not have any partitions.  Usually, there is at least something like /dev/mmcblk0p1, and possibly /dev/mmcblk0p2 and /dev/mmcblk0p3 depending on the boot partition scheme.  However, every time I wrote the SOEdge test "image" to a card (yes, even using a USB-A male-to-male cable and a Rock64 like the instructions said to do), all that would ever result was a /dev/mmcblk0, the same thing you would get with an *unformatted* card.  I could never get beyond that point.  No partition meant nothing to mount or inspect.  Nothing would ever boot, no boot messages would pop up.  It was as if I was booting it without a card even installed, or worse.  I never even got any error messages to come across the serial console. 

I might have done something wrong, but I ran out of ideas.  Defective?  Possibly.  Not my call to make though.  I just gave up, ran out of ideas, moved on to something else.  That does not mean it is defective without a doubt, it just means that it was a nut that I was not able to crack.  I would not be surprised if a working image came along in the next few weeks/months, if for no other reason than Murphy's Law to make me look stupid and impatient.

I am just surprised that nobody else has chimed in here except disappointed owners.  Maybe if other devices start to get based on the same SoC, a working image will eventually emerge, or at least a fresh SDK that does not *require* Ubuntu 16.04, for crying out loud.