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Comment by slezyr | Hacker News Reader

Check your router's CPU. I own 4 routers and all of them use MIPS. RISC-V is more like Graphene, it's yet to leave the lab.

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Home routers used to be one of the last holdouts of MIPS, but all the modern ones have been switching to ARM. It's pretty much on its last legs there aside from the really cheap, low-end stuff.

It is not that way today but for a long time the entry-level Cisco IOS router was PowerPC based, while the highend was invariably MIPS. On the other hand both architectural choices had nothing to do with the architecture and everything to do with choice of usable SoCs for that particular application (with Motorola/Freescale/NXP's "m68k Cisco router/Sun2 on a chip" SoCs being somewhat ironic in this regard).

I wouldn't consider cisco to be a tech-forward company or look to them as the barometer to where the networking industry is headed.

Most of Broadcoms stuff is ARM based now, which is what most folks are putting in white label switches.

Fwiw, Broadcom is also what’s going into Cisco routers. Which supports your point.

> it's yet to leave the lab.

You can buy them on Amazon.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08W2J9B8J

https://www.mouser.com/ProductDetail/?qs=pUKx8fyJudB1sOWbbEn...

> You can buy them on Amazon.

> Currently unavailable. We don't know when or if this item will be back in stock.

Clearly not!

How about these then

https://aliexpress.com/item/4000221852639.html

https://aliexpress.com/item/1005001762637137.html

https://aliexpress.com/item/4000394347886.html

This board is BL602 based. Available and has a growing community.

https://pine64.com/product/pinecone-bl602-evaluation-board/

I have a few of them blinking next to me. They are fine albeit documentation is severely lacking at the moment, but once you realize how cheap they are compared to the alternatives, new possibilities open up.

Interestingly it's based on a 3 stage core from SiFive, not the RocketChip.

Shows as in stock on the 15th for me. I suspect there's some bot arbitrage going on there.

Most newer generation, upcoming replacement of lower cost SKUs, including NAS are all going to ARM.

At one point there were a few more MIPS and even OpenPOWER solution on NAS and router, but at the end having everything on ARM is just so much easier. Little sad to see it go. Especially good old Broadcom MIPS tends to be exceptionally stable.

Ho, ho. Graphene has left the lab, but it's only got as far as the hype mill, not the factory. https://www.manchester.ac.uk/discover/news/the-university-un... was a notable success though; and allegedly graphene-powered trainers there on a different date.

In contrast, with RISC-V you can put your hand in your pocket for early models, can't you?

2021 to me really marked at turning point for RISC-V embedded cores. $4 (+ S/H) for a BL602-based pinecone (or any of the many other BL602 boards). Pretty nice.

Tell it to Digikey: https://www.digikey.com/en/products/detail/seeed-technology-...

(I've got a single board computer from those people that I got in, I think, 2019)

even the BBC is pushing RISC-V: https://www.sparkfun.com/products/17596

All of the recent home routers are ARM based. Maybe yours are at least a few years old?

I had a cheapie 'smart' TV a while ago which was running Android on a MIPS CPU

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