I'm sure you'll see a market in 3rd-party carrier boards & packages with the X1 module on it.

Love the fact that it's got a proper x4 PCIe slot on the dev kit.

Hopefully someone will sell the modules with a MOQ of less than 1k though!!

Yeah, I'm really hoping someone offers carrier boards much like SparkFun did with their blocks[1] for the Intel Edison which passed the Hirose DF40 connector through to allow stacking.

[1] https://learn.sparkfun.com/tutorials/general-guide-to-sparkf...

It's astonishingly beefy, with games-console (or more) levels of computing power. Very few people need that on an embedded board.

Last-gen game consoles levels though, which are more than 10 years old now.

This isn't an "embedded board".. It's got a GPU, it's got PCIe, it's 64-bit with 4 cores.

Yes it is: embedded is a use category, not a performance specification. It's certainly not a "desktop" or "consumer" product as it doesn't even have a case. It's designed to be embedded within another product or system.

That is non starter I think. High performance expensive dev kits don't have good track record at facinating the market.