Comment by topspin
6 hours ago
> we really need to see some benchmarks for things that matter
Honestly, we don't. We know it won't be competitive with the plethora of high performance ARM network SOCs found in commercial routers. If you use this with advanced features enabled (traffic shaping, packet inspection, etc.) on a fast uplink you will be CPU bound, and the CPU isn't fast. This shouldn't be a surprise to anyone that knows why this platform has any appeal.
You don't buy this expecting to max out your 10 Gbps fiber. There are other, valid reasons, but not that, and I'm glad it exists: one day, there will be RISC-V network SOCs that dominate benchmarks.
As someone not involved in this space I assumed there was specialist hardware. My pi Pico can do fancy things with DMA etc, without the CPU at all.
So why isn't there this kind of stuff in routers?
There is, and it is. Just not in this specific SoC, originally intended for general-purpose computing.
So why would CPU speed be the bottleneck then?