I’m not sure Ryzen Embedded is the answer to every SBC use case. Even the budget V3000 line comes with 2x 10 GbE, 20 lanes of PCIe and 8 cores. Does an elevator controller [0], e-scooter [1] or a kiosk need that much power? Doubtful. There is plenty of room for low power Arm SOCs.
There's an obvious market for "wildly unbalanced" microcontrollers.
The actual "elevator controller" or "e-scooter controller" or whatever would run fine on a Z80, but it has to pull something from the cloud (config file, activation unlock). Suddenly, you need a MCU big enough to talk to Wifi/BT/cellular modem, and handle TCP/IP/SSL, and you're looking at ARM and x86 parts.
Something like the "wi-fi modem" concept you see for retrocomputing might be interesting. A black-box component that handles all the connectivity, you pre-program it with the specs of the network transfer, and it exposes the controls and UI for "select wi-fi network/pair bluetooth/etc". On the MCU's side, it would just have a very basic serial or parallel interface, that 8-bit tooling could handle easily.
Never made such an absurd claim, you did by strawman. There's plenty of room for different things. There are too many boards already in high and low niches. That's the point.
The actual "elevator controller" or "e-scooter controller" or whatever would run fine on a Z80, but it has to pull something from the cloud (config file, activation unlock). Suddenly, you need a MCU big enough to talk to Wifi/BT/cellular modem, and handle TCP/IP/SSL, and you're looking at ARM and x86 parts.
Something like the "wi-fi modem" concept you see for retrocomputing might be interesting. A black-box component that handles all the connectivity, you pre-program it with the specs of the network transfer, and it exposes the controls and UI for "select wi-fi network/pair bluetooth/etc". On the MCU's side, it would just have a very basic serial or parallel interface, that 8-bit tooling could handle easily.