Pine/ARM mATX motherboard product?

[derekn]

Do we know why the current industry isn't manufacturing socketed ARM CPUs and motherboards, and/or why current ARM desktop machines are prohibitively expensive? A good deal of the x86 space is socketed and modular while ARM consists almost solely of soldered SoCs and parts not reusable elsewhere. Why would this be?

Presumably it's good ol' supply and demand.

Chips have to be made in large quantities (if you want them to be inexpensive).  The current large-volume markets are:

• desktop PCs and laptops -- mostly x86, with lots of customers who need configurability, hence sockets and so on (though I think laptops all use soldered CPUs these days (?))
  
• phones, tablets -- almost entirely ARM, but also entirely soldered SoC (it's hard to fit a socketed CPU in a phone)
  
• set-top boxes -- also ARM SoCs (the RasPi started out with a set-top box SoC, IIRC)
  
• servers -- x86, but moving toward ARM
  

ARM-based desktop motherboards are a niche thing -- the folks reading this forum would probably like to buy them, but that's a tiny volume compared to anything in that list.

I think the best hope for socketed ARM motherboards will be the server space.  We just need to hope those will trickle down to smaller/cheaper systems.