I got an old Cisco AP and I looked inside!

litchralee , 13 days ago

It never ceases to amaze me how prolific PowerPC/PowerISA was (still is?) in the embedded space

Krafting OP , 13 days ago

Me too! but now it has this weird "retro" feel when you stumble upon something powered by a PowerPC processor

litchralee , 13 days ago (edited 13 days ago)

Agreed. When I was fresh out of university, my first job had me debugging embedded firmware for a device which had both a PowerPC processor as well as an ARM coprocessor. I remember many evenings staring at disassembled instructions in objdump, as well as getting good at endian conversions. This PPC processor was in big-endian and the ARM was little-endian, which is typical for those processor families. We did briefly consider synthesizing one of them to match the other's endianness, but this was deemed to be even more confusing haha

eldavi , 13 days ago (edited 12 days ago)

i use to work IT at a place that used those cisco AP's and i always considered getting one for myself to drown out the other AP's in my apartment building because my wifi was always spotty no matter what channel i picked and whatever survey i took; the price tag at the time (around $1k+ at the time) was the only thing preventing me from doing so.