...
It's probably a smart move on their part. 1000s and 1000s of end users can be a nightmare to support, putting them in the hands of professionals 1st to find issues that can be dealt with in a data center environment with full time support engineers is probably better.
Unlike other manufacturers that let us do the beta testing of the products.
-Dave
Alas from my (limited) experience, Intel is no better at this.
I've bought the parts and built myself, 2 servers - all up about $40k - (all intel: MB, CPU, Case, PSU but other party RAM) and had some interesting problems with them.
Specifically, the Intel motherboards:
First one the base firmware didn't spin the fans - at all - lots of overheating and hard shutdowns.
After discussing with them online for a while, it was indeed the MB needed a software update to fix it.
So while you could say it's my fault for not having done that at the start, I will point out that they had known about it for over a year, but they still didn't update the MB at the factory to fix this rather serious problem.
Second one couple years later, I bought the R version of the same MB due to getting a Xeon Gold 6258R (equivalent fastest 2nd gen CPU they sell)
Oddly enough though, it did not work at all.
It gave some weird light code that no one on the Intel board could identify (and not in the PDF manual)
Turns out that the firmware in the R version of the MB (that exists purely to support the 2nd gen R CPUs) didn't support the top of the line 6258R.
So since I fortunately had 2 Xeon Gold 6148 in the other MB, I took one out, put it in the new MB, booted fine, updated the MB, and now it works with the 6258R.
Had I not had a non R CPU on hand to update the MB, I would have been screwed and had to send it back to Intel to update it as it should have been to start with.
So, yeah, don't expect much from Intel either.
They do quite literally expect people to update faulty firmware themselves, and not ship it updated even if they know its a major problem.
