PA6T was technically the best available option for custom high end PPC board, it just is too expensive and the insanely complex motherboard design makes the price even worse when compared to non AOS4 HW.
No, it wasn't. It's performing poor. Most tests indicate that the e600 core is pretty superior (it's really telling that even a single threaded 744x at lower clock beats a dual threaded higher clocked PA6T).
If A-Eon would have used an e600 based processor (86xx - I dont want to say "I told you so", but well...) they would have a cheaper and more powerful board with a processor that still is supported. Well, now Freescale encourages not to use 86xx for new designs any more, but that line of processors is still active and supported for a while.
I never understood the decision for the PA6T. It's an überexpensive, poor performing EOL chip. A shame so much money was wasted - what else could have been achieved with these $$$?
