Honestly, they are all in a very tough situation. They have to, essentially, engineer 90% of a new platform, to even begin to have a complete solution for their customers. Back in the bad old days, AMD, Cyril, IBM, and a few others were able to essentially just engineer a chip with the required pin out to fit into the existing socket on a PC motherboard. Now, the amount of IP licensing involved in that is both prohibitively expensive and likely not really supportable under current UEFI models. You have to start from the ground up, and only really have access to universal standards, which are still often not royalty free. Then, once you have something that works, you have to prove that it works, and not just that, it has to work that much better than any of the entrenched competitors that someone is willing to pay the cost to convert their operations to your platform on top of the cost of the actual metal itself.
Amazon, Apple and probably Alphabet/Google can handle that without breaking a sweat. Who else will be able to take that risk? How does Fujitsu do it? They have an established ecosystem and are selling essentially turn-key supercomputer solutions. How does IBM power do it? An established ecosystem with a VERY high cost of conversion and a highly risk averse client base is their game.
I personally see only space for established mobile SOC vendors, that have vast revenue streams to play with, to play in the low cost arena with the likes of Chromebooks or Android convertible tablets to establish critical mass. Marvel might have been able to do that as it’s cost would have been much lower and those sorts of chips fit into its existing volume portfolio better. Then, they could have leveraged the android App Store to do their software distribution with vendors working to do ports of important software. With Apple pushing the ARM message in their closed garden, it would at least have increased industry knowledge of ARM programming.
Maybe Qualcomm or Samsung can get somewhere some day.
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