Most ARM cases would mean a tremendous amount invested in reverse engineering of binary blobs required to configure network and crypto-accelerators. Also, in most cases, it means no support *BSD like OPNsense and pfSense. That leads to fully proprietary designs, lack of transparency, and limited trustworthiness.

What we were able to realize over the years of writing firmware and researching new solutions for network appliance vendors is that support for accelerators is considered a premium feature and typically is available only behind paywall corporate unobtanium. Consider very respected silicon vendors, such as Marvell [1] or NXP [2].

If you have in mind hardware (no matter if x86, Arm, RISC-V, or POWER) that would be able to mark all checkboxes that PC Engines score [3] with 10G performance, then it would be exciting competition otherwise, we are very far from community expectations, where most BSD users with open-source firmware based hardware choose PC Engines or Protectli [4].

[1]: https://www.spinics.net/lists/linux-crypto/msg53306.html

[2]: https://www.nxp.com/support/support/nxp-engineering-services...

[3]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35636960

[4]: https://bsd-hardware.info/?view=computers&f=node_coreboot&v=...