Gigabit Ethernet?

General
#1

Hi,

I am very excited about armv8 as existing armv7 single board computers lack the processing power and bus speed to fully support gigabit networking throughput. For example, the BeagleBone advertises “Gigabit ethernet” but can only hit somewhere in the 300-500mbps range due to internal bus limitations. I’ve heard this is due to lack of good gigabit ethernet chipset support in the existing ARM ecosystem.

The existing products lack physical ethernet ports. Are there any plans to produce a development board with a physical true gigabit port? My ideal board would be one with very minimal graphics (designed for headless use in a data center) and one that focused on fast disk I/O (e.g. USB 3.0, eSATA) and networking (gigabit ethernet).

#2

Hi - the 96Boards Consumer Edition (CE) is targeted around mobile and embedded 32 and 64 bit SoCs that typically support eMMC/SD disk storage and wireless or USB based networking. It is possible to put an RJ45 Gigabit ethernet port on the Extended Version of the CE, but few mobile/embedded SoCs support this interface. By the end of June expect to see the 96Boards Enterprise Edition (EE) which is targeted at high end embedded, networking and server SoCs, including facilities for USB 3.x, SATA, high speed networking 1GBit+, and PCIe. This is directly targeted at your ideal board description and you can expect to see first boards in the market later this year.