>>> another advantage of the P50X0 cpu? DDR3 and much higher memory bandwidth,
>>> that will [...] help close the gap with G5s (the best G5s only offer DDR2).

>> If I interpret Andreas Wolf's benchmarks above, it says that the X5000 has
>> a slight upper hand for most (non-SIMD) integer operations. For floating
>> point and memory speed, it seems to be the other way round.

> Its really the other elements of the e5500 and e6500 cored cpus Soc that drive
> my interest. PCIe, higher bandwidth memory, (somewhat) faster SATA, etc.

Regarding memory performance, my G5 clearly destroys the X5000 as can be seen from the benchmarks in this thread, despite what's written on spec papers.

> there are decoding ICs available for both PCI and PCIe applications that drivers
> could be written for.

Indeed, but I'd still favour an ASMP solution to keep my 2nd CPU from feeling bored. After all, it is unremovably sitting there constantly drawing current and creating heat. I'd consider using a dedicated expansion card for video decoding (or transcoding) an option as soon as MorphOS supports switching off (or power saving modes for) the 2nd G5 CPU.

> I just don't see the point in using 70-100% of our available cpu power on one task.

I don't have a problem with that, especially if it's spare CPU power anyway.