Let's start at the bottom and work our way up.. if dual-core isn't as exciting as you guys make out, we would have a long way to fall :D

There are lots of advantages to going dual-core and some even for going 64-bit, but not right this second. Let's get these first 3 designs out of the door first. You won't be disappointed in the MPC8610..



There's even an advantage with the MPC5121E here; the built-in AXE unit would be perfectly capable of doing data streaming, manipulation and even disk encryption offloading the CPU. While building NAS boxes out of the Efika might be a bit of a silly idea (it's too expensive after all, and there is no advantage to using the MPC5200B over a much cheaper to use ARM or MIPS chip - see the new Linkstations for THAT), the MPC5121E actually could perform well in something similar to those disks-with-media-players products from Linksys and so on.

Well, EFIKA (and PPC in general) has some great advantages over ARM and MIPS for those, who like to build/configure their own servers:

- no need to cross compile, as PPC is not only embedded

- more linux distributions support it

Just see my http://www.powerdeveloper.org/forums/vi ... php?t=1223 post! That machine is changed now a bit. My (closed ARM Linux based) ADSL router passed away a few days ago. I added an USB->Ethernet adapter (I have an 8Mbit ADSL line, so the on-board USB connector was sufficient) and turned my EFIKA server into a router. And suddenly my Internet experience got a lot better. FTP connections build up immediately instead of waiting for 5-10 seconds, Thunderbird opens mailboxes faster, etc. It's even better for MLDonkey, as behind a NAT it gets always a LowID, now on the router it gets HighID and downloads about 10x faster :-)

Best of all, the things mentioned above can be achieved by a few mouse clicks, as YaST2 can be started in a VNC session. The only hand editing I needed was for MLDonkey, to open up admin ports towards the local network. I'm not aware of such an easy administration AND flexibility on ARM and MIPS :-) Configuring my ARM Linux based router is (was) easy using the web interface, but lacked the flexibility of a full featured Linux distribution. With lots of manual work I could cross compile everything I need, but that needs lots of work and lacks ease of administration.

You could run Debian natively on an ARM board and compile it though: no differently than on PPC. It's just you don't see many quad-core ARM blades :D



That's true, but it's not as if none of them do. I think the days of needing a native system to compile are coming to an end. With things like icecream and cross-compiler support improving if only so that users can generate x86_64 binaries on standard x86 machines!



That is probably far more to do with the fact that the 400MHz MPC5200B is 3x-4x faster than the ARM or MIPS chip in your router, just on the basis that it runs at a faster clock speed (most high end ADSL2 routers have ~100-200MHz chips) and then the better and more generic architecture of PowerPC (which would be better to say it bridges a gap between true, hardcore RISC methology and CISC, without throwing away all the benefits)

As a sort of showcase of using PowerPC as network offloading, do you remember those KillerNIC network cards? They run a Freescale MPC8343E at 333-400MHz. The entire gamut of possible offloads is pushed into a PPC chip - so your Windows box doesn't have to. It is basically a transparent network bridge on a PCI card, which performs software packet rescheduling, MTU optimisation (fragmented packets are bad), can offload IPSec and all the usual checksumming, plus.. run BitTorrent on the card, host a disk on the USB port..

The card runs Linux, and you can even access a telnet session on it from the host side, and run commands out of it's initrd. If you were insane you could write your own firmware and Linux distribution for it.. and people have :D



I'm not sure most people would actually want a full Linux distribution to control their router. It's hard enough to set them up..

Most of my friends use an old PC running Linux as router at home, some of the insane use Windows instead of Linux. But in any case, a full OS. Neither of these are difficult to set up. With openSUSE it just a few clicks, windows networking and connection sharing is more difficult than YaST :-) But even with Debian and reading a few docs it should not be more than a half an hour of configuration. An ADSL router also needs that, if one wants to do it properly and not just trust blindly in defaults.

An EFIKA can do same job as the PC, but without the added noise, and in the same size as the ADSL router. A second Ethernet port would be a bonus, but can easily be worked around with an USB->Ethernet adapter.

For me, a perfect board would be a 8610, with two Ethernet ports (like the Pegasos) and four SATA ports to build the ultimate NAS/Router.

The perfect router board would, like the KillerNIC, use the MPC8343E, or maybe the MPC8349E, or maybe even now, the MPC8379E :)

It would make for an expensive board, but I think a high performance 4-port router is possible. Adding wireless to it - something everyone might want these days - would put the cost far, far above that of a standard router. This makes it simply unaffordable and will not put at the top of the listings on Amazon for "wireless router sales". The benchmark product is the Asus WL-700gE - a $250 4-port router with a 160GB hard disk, USB 2.0 ports and so on.

I think it's easily possible to take the MPC8379E and make a router - with a 4-port switch on one ethernet port and the other for "internet" - use the SATA ports for internal disk and external eSATA, USB for flash drives and so on, add a decent SPI audio codec, install media servers like Firefly so you can stream as well as have it plugged into speakers..

Do people really want or need these features, though? :D

I'd love to see it done, regardless of how much it would cost in development and how low sales may be for a product "worth" $300 in the market based on features. Who here would buy a $300 router?

Several companies already sell such things. Microtik, for instance, sells MIPS and PPC based devices, including e300 and e500 ones. Gateworks sells XScale boards, as does ADI engineering. And Soekris and PC Engines, of course, sell x86 ones.

I have no idea how much business they do. I own one of the Gateworks boards, and know people who have Microtik ones. It is a nice thing to have, and, I think, serves an equivalent market to the EFIKA in networking.
-Nathan

Wow. I looked at all of the boards you referred to. From those the Soekris board was the closest to my dreams:

http://www.soekris.com/net5501.htm

The rest were pure router boards, without any storage options. Also they did not look suitable for a generic Linux/BSD what I prefer to use.

But the overall favorite is the board based on the mpc8379e. To be perfect just add a bit more RAM, add a simple audio, replace PCI with miniPCI to keep size down, and it is ready :-) One can add a miniPCI WiFi card, a few HDDs ( http://www.addonics.com/products/raid_s ... s25nsa.asp ) and the all in one SOHO server is ready.

There will also be a new ColdFire board.

Stay tuned!

R&B :)

I have a Synology Disk Station DS107+. It may be a bit more expensive than the Asus device you mentioned, but it surely is a wonderful device. I use it for file storage and sharing (1TB), printer sharing, FTP, Web development (it has a complete LAMP setup). It is *very* feature rich, you can even transfer torrent download jobs to it from your main computer if you want to turn that one off. It is not a router though, but I already have one (and only need one). But if you could make a MPC8379E based product (with or without the "router", with room for 4x SATA drives in the case), then I think you would have a solid product.



But it would be *so much more* than "just a router", wouldn't it?

Just remember the competition:

ZyXEL NSA-220 with 2 drives
ZyXEL NSA-2400 with 4 hotswap drives

Promise NS4300N with 4 hotswap drives.

And of course, all QNAP models.

I would say that this market is pretty marture today. In Sweden more and
more of these are sold each day, and the prices are going down.

It will not be enough to just offer RAID-storage and maybe a torrent
client. You will need to offer something extra, something unique.
Otherwise you will have a very hard time competing with these
cheap devices. The NSA-220 cost 200 EUR (1800 SEK) in Sweden
with no disks.. And there are even cheaper brands..

These are not competition at all. What I, and most of my friends want to have is a low power board with a couple of SATA and Ethernet ports and be able to install a full featured Linux distribution on it, not just a crippled, firmware like stuff, with a broken web interface. Not a 'consumer' product, but a geek toy for DIY UNIX fans, like me :-) Or system integrators, where they drop such a box at each client as firewall, proxy server, etc., using a small PPC system targeted to this usage area instead of a generic PC system with a second network card...

czp;
No competition at all?

I'm a systems integrator and I purchase solutions for
my clients. There is no idea to purchase some wierd
components and build some crappy case in wood
when I can get a fully-loaded ZyXEL UTM-firewall
and install and configure it a few hours.

Instead of looking for hours on some obscure Linux
installation progress-bar.

There is big competition in both the NAS-market and
the firewall-market.

If you want to offer something for firewalls, I recommend
you to build an SSL VPN gateway, maybe based on the
GPL:ed version of SSL Explorer or OpenVPN.

SSL VPN is the hottest VPN today. SSL VPN solutions
bring you good margins..

Well, it depends. When you have specific requirements, large enough or many clients, then it is just simpler and more flexible to create a custom solution. And I have yet to find an out of box solution, which fits all of my needs...

great discussion here. i suppose back to the topic, when will these be avaliable ? and when would more information be avaliable ? my pentium3 799 MHz is waiting to be replaced :-D

also, any chance the new efika/pegasus will play high def video (480p, 720p, 1080p) either mpeg2 or mpeg4 ? i assume no mpeg4 at all since thats really a cpu hog. maybe a chance with mpeg2 and xv or something.

matt

matt, you said the firmware would be yours, Aura if i read correctly? i do not own an efika or pegasus yet and not familiar with the current firmware or how it boots. i assume it needs to get the kernel off the hard disk or network ? is nvram supported to put the kernel?

if boots off the hard drive what filesystems and partition maps are supported ?

it would be nice if the firmware was a socket with a prom chip so it could be changed. not that you would support that but leave corebios as an option. perhaps put the linux kernel in nvram or something.

just a thought. perhaps i am rambling about stuff i dont know about. like i said i have an old pentium3 and that only supports dos partitions... sucks.

matt