This is extremely suspicious. A totally unknown company is making a high-performance PowerPC processor? Why?
That said, if they have the original designs for these CPUs then it's not impossible for a startup to make meaningful improvements, but it almost certainly isn't going to be fabbed on a cutting edge node and certainly won't be competitive with anything else on the market (not that they were to begin with).
(EDIT: OP was talking about the chip manufacturer, not the system maker. And OP is asking a very good question.)
Practically every chip company these days is fabless. Intel is the exception, not the rule.
That being said, designing a new high end cpu is very expensive and complex. That a hitherto unknown company embarks on such a project is, indeed, very suspicious.
A lot of analog and mixed-signal companies aren't: TI, NXP, ADI (with LT, ON Semi, Maxim, ...), Avago/Broadcom, AMS, Bosch, Infineon, Elmos etc.; also "the Japanese" (Sony, Fujitsu, Oki, Canon, Rohm and probably more)
These CPUs are completely open and "free". In addition to the libre philosophy this guarantees a level of security unobtainable with any other CPU.
The same rationale is behind the powerpc laptop project https://www.powerpc-notebook.org/en/
That said, who knows, I almost wouldn't be surprised; there's been loads of weird unique systems. Compaq SystemPro had custom SMP support to allow for dual 386s, which IIRC is even supported by Windows NT 3.1 officially. I think IBM x445s had some custom crazy interconnect for 32-way Xeon MPs, etc.
This was in 2001, maybe I am misremembering and it was P3?
That's a lot of jumpers https://www.asrock.com/mb/Intel/P4%20Combo/
Also the two memory slots just somewhere in-between the PCI slots.
Some PCIe 1.0 (maybe also 2.0) boards did similar stuff to allow choosing between PCIe x16 and x8+x8.