> If this is something that can be addressed, then its a little early to start throwing up
> red flags about it.

The issue was known und mentioned in public already last year by me (in comparison to PowerMac G5) and others (in comparison to X1000):

"The X5000 [...] gets oblitrated by the X1000 when it comes reading and writing to memory"
http://morph.zone/modules/newbb_plus/viewtopic.php?forum=11&topic_id=11137&start=623

Has anybody from A-Eon or Varisys been investigating this since?

> we knew about the PCI-E limitations quite awhile ago.

What I didn't know until I looked it up today is that the P5040 is even way more limited than the P5020 in this regard. I knew that the P5040 had one controller less, but it adds 2 SerDes lanes ...just not for PCIe, apparently, as the P5040 can use only two thirds of the lanes for this compared to P5020 (8 vs. 12), or four fifths for SerDes configs that include SATA controllers (8 vs. 10). That's a shame and very unfortunate for a common board design, severely crippling the more capable (in terms of PCIe) SoC.