> the memory benchmarks I've seen are no faster than my
> PC133 equipped Quicksilver.

I take it you refer to the RAGEMEM benchmark results ("RAM" section). Could you please provide your Quicksilver results here?

> Overall, there's not much difference between this board and the
> P2020 Freescale board Andreas and I discussed (except the
> Freescale board is only $595 with a hard drive pre-loaded with Linux).

Now you're being unfair towards the Sam460ex. In my opinion it has some features which surely make for an advantage over Freescale's P2020RDB from an end-user's point of view:

* one PCIe x4 with x16 connector + one PCIe x1 + one PCI (vs. two PCIe x1)
* six USB2 + one USB1.1 (vs. one USB2)
* SATA (vs. none)
* on-board audio (vs. none)

Besides, it seems you're once more confusing the $595 P2020RDB and the $3,500 P2020DS, the latter being the one that comes with an integrated HDD.

> we dismissed the Freescale offering because it had many
> of the faults present in the SAM460EX.

The $595 P2020RDB is to be dismissed because it's in no way suited for the desktop market (see comparison to the Sam460ex above), and as I told you already in this very thread, the $3,500 P2020DS is to be dismissed because it's just way too expensive for our purposes. Moreover, anything lacking a proper FPU (like the e500v2 core in the P2020) should be dismissed for desktop computing purposes.
None of these points apply to the Sam460ex (the price argument at least not to the same extent), and I never said or implied I'd dismiss "the Freescale offering because it had many of the faults present in the SAM460EX".