> It is precisely to avoid running Linux and the "wealth of drivers".

Why not? I understand not wanting to deal with unnecessary complexity as a hobbyist, but you'll find yourself creating far more complexity trying to implement all of this yourself (and vendors certainly don't want to support you in this). Secondly, I think the number of customers for chip vendors who are uncomfortable with setting up an embedded Linux environment, but perfectly confident in routing DDR and PCIe signals is approximately 0.

> What I am trying to point out is that there is a huge market gap.

> i.MX8 is not realtime and the support for running bare metal code is very much non existent.

This isn't quite true and is what I'm trying to get at. Most of these embedded SoCs contain a Cortex-M and a Cortex-A (not all but there are quite a lot). High performance DRAM, external PCIe devices, and large internal caches are fantastic for compute performance but most of the things you want to do with a PCIe device (networking, asynchronous compute) don't require cycle-accurate determinism. Generally there isn't much you need to do with such stringent timing requirements, so you can offload that work to secondary Cortex-M33 core with a shared memory interface to the main core and get the best of both worlds.

I see so many systems trying to take advantage of the impressive compute power of modern MCUs (which is really cool!) but often end up just re-inventing the cooperative multitasking OS, but worse.