No, CPUs is more relevant. Linux runs on M1, and if they sold CPUs, someone would make a board they could be put on that fit in standard server form factors. For this type of comparison, people want CPUs, not the next version of Xserve.
But Apple doesn't sell the M1 cpu without a Mini or MB carrier included.
I think relatively few people want to buy a rackmount server based on a motherboard that hosts a cannibalized M1 limited to the 16GB of RAM that it came with, paying the price premium for the rest of the machine. An M1 seems to be roughly equivalent to an Ryzen 5000-series CPU, and you can get those for $300 (6c/12t) through $1K (16c/32t) without having to go through the labor costs of pulling out the CPU from a $900 carrier.
I'm not sure I follow. The relevant part of the thread as I saw it was "too bad Apple does not sell CPUs." Selling the CPUs would mean you wouldn't need to cannibalize anything, and in a discussion about the merits of AMD vs Intel as the part used in a platform like this, comparing the bare CPU seems more relevant.
Rack Mac Pros are targeted at racks that are mostly filled with audio/video equipment. Apple really doesn't seem to have any interest in selling server products again.
So? It's still rack-mountable workstation-class hardware that will probably be running on Apple Silicon at some point. And it will probably be possible to boot Linux on it, similar to existing M1 Macs. That's pretty indistinguishable from many servers.
You seem to be thinking that a server and a workstation are the same, ignoring that server skus need oob management, apis, hardware support and so many other things as table stakes
Not all of it, and not necessarily well, which was one reason they weren't super popular except for the case you really needed Apple software. It seemed more aimed at the "I want to colocate a box somewhere and I run Apple in the office and I might also want to in the datacenter for some reason or another" rather than "this is a solid platform that offers all the bells and whistles I would expect because I'm deploying tens or hundreds or these".
