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The Intel Edison, Galileo, Curie, and Joule boards were roughly similar to what you propose. They were all discontinued in 2017.

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Those boards were the right form. The problem they did not realize was their price was 5x what it needed to be to compete.

And, IIRC, the Quark X chip in the Galileo board sold for like $5 in quantities.

I've been thinking of how to build educational clusters with chips like these (current candidate is the Octavo SoM that a TI Sitara core, RAM, some flash, an SD controller and two Ethernet ports) that could have a couple dozen nodes, connected by one or two Ethernet switches, all assembled on a single PCB. A bit like the Pine 64 Sopine clusters, but with more, simpler nodes. The built in Flash can be used to network boot the node, eliminating a large cost in external flash.

Exactly, they shouldn't be designed to be major profit product. They should be sold at cost to support their ecosystem.

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