@all

I want to ask a quick question to get your oppinion on a possible feature change from the eval board.
Do you think we need Gigabit Ethernet? How many home or busniness environments support it?
There are 4xRJ45 Ethernet ports on the reference board:
2x10/100/1000 coming off an Intel combined MAC and PHY on one of the two 64bit PCI-X 133mhz interfaces
1x10/100 coming off the 405EP service processor
1x10/100 coming off the AMD 8111 southbridge
My idea is that by removing the Intel Gigabit MAC+PHY we could reclaim the second PCI-X channle and ahve two independat sets of PCI-X slots, bearing in mind that with 1 item on PCI-X it runs at 133mhz but with 2 it slows to 100mhz IIRC, combine the speed advantage gained by a higher clockspeed with the fact that the buses would each be able to handle data trsfer simultaniously and this could be one riproaring system. The reference board uses 2xPCI-X slots off one PCI-X bus and 4x32bit 33mhz PCI sltos off the AMD8111 southbridge.
My idea is to sacrafice the Gigabit LAN to get a second sed of 133mhz 64bit PCI-X connectors and use only 2 32bit 33mhz PCI connectors. The chipset implementation of PCI-X will determin whether it is possible or not but I can see no reason why it wouldn't be. I'm not sure what effect this would have on teh cost of teh moptherboard, almost certainly decrease it thought how noticable this would be I don't know. You replace 2 PCI slots with 2 PCI-X slots so a few pence their but you save yourself several dolars on the Intel Gigabit Mac+PHY combo as well as teh 2xRJ45 connectors that go with it. If people want Gigabit ethernet they can get a cheap PCI card (for example £ from ebuyer.co.uk) and stick it in one of the PCI slots (They can take the bandwith with 16Megabit per second to spare if both run at full speed, which neither ever do!) thus saving yourself 2 nice fast PCI-X slots