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Comment by mrb | Hacker News Reader

Does anyone know of a small ARM computer board supporting gigabit Ethernet? The ones I find are physically too large, eg: http://www.tweaktown.com/news/24233/via_introduces_amazing_4...

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What is your project? At GigE line rate you have approximately 8 CPU cycles/byte at 1Ghz, which doesn't count for much on ARM

My project is a tiny box in the living room that copies Blu-ray discs over NFS to a multi-TB fileserver. The difference between 100Mbps and 1Gbps when copying a 40GB image is 55 min vs. 5 min...

I should add that with DMA and checksum offloading, even a (relatively) slow CPU can handle 1Gbps data transmission rate easily.

brigade: thanks for the board tips!

Sabre lite and nitrogen6x. Supports SATA too.

Last I knew, and I'll admit I haven't looked recently, the gigabit was actually limited to something like 480M. The only other one I can think of that is armv7+ (that isnt mx6) with gigabit is the OpenBlocks which has 2 or 4 gigE ports but there is no video on it.

Depends on the packet size. With 64k packets, you can easily approach 800M. But, yes, default packet of 8k will yield 480M at best.

This is the latest update it seems http://boundarydevices.com/i-mx6-ethernet/ but that is decent for a consumer type ARM device (I presume some of the server options do better).

i dont think it makes too much sense as the CPUs cant handle the throughput anyway. There are alot of older NAS with Gigabit ethernet that hardly come near those speeds because the CPUs are just too slow. I am not sure where the current ARM CPUs are performance wise in relation to that, but i dont think you would get much more than 100Mbit out of it anyway.

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