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Comment by feld | Hacker News Reader

What is your definition of cheap? Don't rule out ARM based solutions.

^- While cheap toy SoCs like those found in SBCs do (all?) have NEON, which includes hardware acceleration for SHA1/2 and AES, don't assume good performance. A x86 desktop core is faster in software than those SoCs with hardware.

However, the poor I/O capabilities of most/all toy SoCs rule use as a high-bandwidth router out; you can't do Gigabit routing with just one built-in MAC and the other connected to a USB 2.0 port or somesuch.

The expressobin board has 3 NICs, runs a dual-core Marvell 3700, which is ARMv8, and has a crypto-offload on the SoC.

It sells for $49 on Amazon. https://www.amazon.com/dp/B06Y3V2FBK

AES-GCM runs quite well on ARMv8:

https://www.rsaconference.com/writable/presentations/file_up...

That's an interesting board, but it still only has one Ethernet interface, plus an on-board switch.

It has two, actually. I'm looking at the 3700 and some of the NXP CPUs for a 2018 "microfirewall".

We have a 3 port ARM board (one port has a switch on it) being announced on Thursday.

The device has 3 ethernet interfaces - one directly connected to the SoC, and the other two via an onboard switch.

That's not at all what the board's block diagram [0] depicts, but apparently they don't care to make that accurate. While the photographs do make it clear that there are three Ethernet ports, it's wrong to say that there are three Ethernet interfaces; the SoC only supports two and it's misleading to count the extra switched ports as extra interfaces because they do not even have the theoretical possibility of contributing to better routing capabilities.

[0] http://espressobin.net/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/ESPRESSObi...

Well, to get 2.5 running I am going to have to build another box. I'll need a CPU and motherboard. Possibly RAM. I'd like to find that for under $300. Under $150 would be more ideal.

I'm certainly not ruling anything out. I simply want to be able to get a working PFSense instance up and running.

PCengines APU2 has an AMD CPU with AES-NI, http://www.pcengines.ch/apu2c4.htm

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