For users like myself constrained by memory bandwidth I would prefer that they publicly started selling their Skylake-SP Purley platform. In some configurations they even include a 100Gbit/s photonic interconnect and an FPGA for Deep Learning acceleration.
I would gladly pay $2500-3500 for an 18-24 core Intel CPU with hexa-channel DDR4 and PCIe 4.0 (or simply more than 44 lanes of 3.0).
I'd suppose the feeling of exclusivity isn't much of a sales point to processor buyers.
I supply is constrained, seems like demand could be similarly constrained by a price hike.
Do they get better feedback from these select customers? Better acceptance of eventual defects without bad PR?
To justify extreme price differences so the 'select customers' can credibly claim this expensive stuff gives them an edge their competitors will not be able to easily match.
In an arms race arms that are supply constrained will fetch premium prices.
http://www.tomshardware.com/news/amd-threadripper-vega-pcie-...
Other sites also report that it will support 2 TByte of RAM like the single socket Naples/Epyc, but LRDIMM and official/validated ECC support was not mentioned in the stream.