[pgeorgi]

That cheapest COTS block also has the advantage of being battle tested by the big customer base.

Since you presumably have pretty good contacts into IBM: ever asked if they'd consider pooling resources with other vendors around their interconnects in an open forum?

Not sure if DDR4 (or USB, or even PCIe 4.0) silicon is a huge differentiator for them, and those protocols all thrive on interoperability: no need for IBM (or Marvell, for example) to figure out all the issues with real world peripherals on their own.

[tpearson-raptor]

The general answer is yes and yes. That's why OMI / OpenCAPI are being released as standards, with RTL / HDL. I think at this point there would be more appetite for a next gen interface like DDR5 vs. DDR4 to be released, but I'm just speaking personally from general knowledge here.