There's some kind of market segmentation at play where nobody will make a high-quality board with a low-end "chipset" even though it would be perfect for many customers.
The segmentation goes the other way too. At one point, there were no Ryzen boards that could be rack-mounted for enterprise use.
Memory slot direction doesn't seem that important. At least, I've got a desktop board in a rack that seems happy enough. Or is there something other than memory direction that puts you off, ipmi perhaps?
If you put it in a 1U case I would be very surprised if it didn't matter - I'm doing that with a very low power platform and the clearance between the memory and the case only leaves a 2-3 mm gap, which I doubt would permit sufficient airflow for a normal passive CPU heatsink with a normal CPU power.
That's definitely true, 1U is mostly filled by memory height. My boxes all have GPUs in so I don't get to go that short.
Yes, ASRock X470 was the first Ryzen board with BMC/ipmi.
I suppose this Knoll chip is intended as a license key for motherboards. Else there will be tons of ... interesting stuffs.
Indeed, it's basically an expensive ROM chip with BIOS.