The competitor is the Orange Pi 5 Plus, also has 2x 2.5GB Ethernet, same SoC, more USBports, no integrated WiFi+BT (optional M.2 module), eMMC connector, M.2 NVMe socket (up to 2280).
I have one, and Armbian has an official release for it and works quite well with a Kioxia 512GB NVMe.
But at this moment I'm just saying there are similar boards out there, and the 5 Plus might be slightly cheaper (no wireless though). Radxa also has a similar board based on same SoC but only has one GbE port and price might be similar to the Banana Pi.
How is the software support? It seems like you could alternatively get a nice quad-core x86 Intel box with a handful of 2.5G ports off of AliExpress for around $120(you'd have to bring your own RAM and SSD in those cases though) and enjoy full Ubuntu/OpenWrt support.
According to the official website, it will officially have Android 12.0, Debian 11 and Buildroot support and will unofficially support Armbian, Ubuntu 20.04, Ubuntu 22.04 and Kylin OS.
As for x86, I'd really like to try and avoid it for a router.
While losing money from people who didn't buy frames manufactured by them, yes. That's the point of open source, to let the community have ownership of the design and to make your business model less reliant on intellectual property.
Can the N100 even run two ports at line speed, let alone 6? Having 2.5Gps ports is cool and all but even using it as a 2-port firewall I’d be curious what throughput you could get with it.
I've got a Protectli VP2420 running OPNSense at home, which has 4x Intel i225-V 2.5gbe running on a weaker Celeron J6412, and I was able to get the expected iperf performance of ~2.35gbps from some brief testing between two directly connected machines. I didn't really do any deeper testing than that though, and I'm not currently doing any crazy threat detection stuff.
I can think of one valid use case for this unsolved by any other solution:
Lets say a company has an SoC board base product currently currently base on ARM. They want to eventually migrate to RISC-V based solution.
If a company has a product currently written to use ARM compiled code, but wants to transition to RISC-V (which isn't ready yet), they could deploy this board which could run today's ARM implementation, and it would be future-ready when the RISC-V implementation would be released without having to replace hardware.
So you get either a mediocre ARM or a mediocre RISC-V, plus an even worse RISC-V, plus an 8051 core.
I've seen a lot of crazy, stupid SOC designs in the last decades, but this is extraordinary.
And the board has USB2, 10/100 Ethernet, Wifi and/or(?) BT, and 512MB RAM. With no real support on the software side, and to small to run a modern Linux efficiently. If this board costs more than $10, it is doomed.
Reminds me of my Commodore 128. You could boot it into 64 bit mode for legacy programs. I had exactly one C-128 game (which was a super complicated combat flight sim) so I only used it in C-64 mode.
This is pretty late, they've been out for months. The most recent addition is the Pocket 8086, waiting on mine to get delivered.
It probably doesnt matter to most of you but it has an 8 bit ISA add-on board, meaning its an easy way to test era appropriate components such as Audio and video cards. Great for people more interested in vintage hardware than software.
All of these AliExpress Protectli knockoffs are great for keeping prices reasonable and I'm yet to come across anyone that's rued taking the opportunity to buy one.
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