>>that preference probably helped cinch the decision to use the
>>P5020 and P5040 on X5000 motherboards.

>That wasn't a question of preference. In 2012/2013, there simply was no other sensible CPU choice to make for a new, high-performance (in PPC terms, that is) desktop PPC board than QorIQ P5. (I've never seen any PPC476FP-based SoC for sale on the respective manufacturer's website or at semiconductor distributors, so minimum purchase quantity would likely have been too high for A-Eon anyway.)

Yes IBM products are unobtainable useless you are a "qualified" buyer.
IBM's marketing methods must be modeled after the Stanley brothers.

There were no Freescale cpus at the time that could match the PA6T (P5s were not available at the time).

And Applied Micro's announced developments often never saw the light of day, or the products capabilities were scaled down.


As to the SB600, that would be my hubris showing.
I should not have underestimated the knowledgeably of some my fellow posters.
At the time, I knew the SB600 was a functional equivalent of the ULi Southbridge used in Freescale evaluation designs.
It had less pins, so there was more multiplexing of pin inputs and outputs to produce the same connectivity.
As such, it wasn't a direct swap, requiring some re-engineering.
But it was the only real logical choice (as the SB450 was not really competitive with ULi components or the later SB600).

So as a natural choice, my default to it was not that original.



[ Edited by Jim 20.05.2016 - 11:10 ]