> The PA6T (made by IBM)

The PA6T was designed by P.A. Semi (bought by Apple a decade ago) and manufactured by Texas Instruments.

> is under utilized on the X1000.

Hardware-wise, I consider the Nemo board a good design by Varisys, despite the obscure xCORE/Xena stuff. All SerDes lanes of the PA6T have been put to good use and the GbE controller is routed to a PHY and jack.

> The SB600 does most of the work

You mean the allegedly under-utilized PA6T should do more of what the SB600 does? If so, what tasks would that be?

> and moves data to/fro the CPU through a single high speed pipeline.

These 4 lanes (1 GB/s total) should provide sufficient bandwidth for the SB600 and its controllers (SATA/PATA, USB, audio, PCI). The SB600 doesn‘t support a wider connection anyway.

> That includes the PCI network card.

If the OS can‘t use the PA6T‘s GbE, a supported PCIe NIC can be used, so that the network traffic doesn‘t have to go through the SB600.

> Pretty much the X1k was a 'just-get-it-working' and kick it out the door type of project.

That‘s certainly not my impression.

> the X1k is not that much different than the A1SE/XE

I think it‘s worlds apart, both design-wise and component-wise. The Eyetech AmigaOne (Mai Logic Teron) boards are bug-ridden evaluation boards with questionable components (ArticiaS northbridge and 82C686B southbridge). You can see that Varisys is a professional board design company whereas Mai Logic was not.

> which was supposed be a system only to get OS4 working on PPC.

The Eyetech AmigaOne boards were developed by Mai Logic under the Teron moniker as evaluation boards for their northbridge chipsets and for running Linux.

> A development system, and it was sold as such.

The AmigaOne SE (Teron CX), yes. The AmigaOne XE (Teron PX) was sold by Eyetech as end-user system, especially after OS4 became available.

> the A1XE somehow became the standard base design for all that followed.

There‘s no way that anything that followed, except the Micro-A1, was based on the AmigaOne XE.

> looks like the X5000 will follow suit

In my opinion, the biggest problem with the Cyrus Plus board‘s hardware design is its compatibility with both the P5020 and the P5040, which leaves the P5020 halfway under-utilized in terms of SerDes lanes and PCIe controllers.

http://morph.zone/modules/newbb_plus/viewtopic.php?forum=11&topic_id=12137&start=97

Moreover, the X5000 seems to suffer from a severe memory bandwidth problem, caused by either the SoC‘s memory controller or a firmware bug or mis-configuration.

http://morph.zone/modules/newbb_plus/viewtopic.php?forum=11&topic_id=11137&start=623

> Pfffffft! Microsoft.

Huh? :-)