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Comment by nyadesu | Hacker News Reader

>"Future Raspberry Pi board may be able to take advantage of the higher video resolution and framerate enabled by the new camera module."

This is interesting, the community it's been asking for more powerful Raspberry Pi models, with more PCI lanes too. Models like that would be amazing for building NAS, routers and IoT devices

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I’ve always wanted to run a small pi box as a router with pfsense. Right now my only other option for a small all in one, low power pfsense box is maybe an Intel NUC?

For pfsense you'd really do a lot better with a small x86-64 system (mini-itx motherboard) that has four or more gigabit ethernet ports with Intel chipset onboard, attached to PCI-E 3.0 bus. In a small mini-itx case it would definitely be a lot bigger than a raspberry pi but also a great deal more capable.

Depending on your needs you can also get systems that have several 10GbE SFP+ cages on-motherboard.

If you search "mini firewall appliance" or "pfsense router" on your favorite marketplaces you'll get results for some custom intel hardware that has all of everything you need in a package smaller than mITX.

yes, the usual industrial/embedded motherboard manufacturers build such things, some are NUC sized.

If you're looking for something cheaper than a Pi try finding used thin clients, which are basically x86 industrial PCs. With a managed switch behind it you can use seperate VLANs so that you can run pfsense with both WAN and LAN on a single NIC. Obviously this will cause reduced speed on the WAN-LAN interface due to the single shared NIC, but if you're looking at a Pi anyways the networking performance of the thin client may be adequate for your needs.

Your biggest hurdle there is that pfsense requires x86-64

or free 8 year old laptop with a cracked screen

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