[Bloat] RED against bufferbloat

[Jonathan Morton]

> But do we know whether mobile phone SOCs actually make good routers?

Many of them probably don't, due to limited off chip I/O bandwidth, but
their CPU cores would be useful in an SoC which did have such bandwidth.

The BCM2435/6 used in the Raspberry Pi/2 is a classic example of such a
phone SoC; its I/O is very flexible and its GPU remarkably powerful (really
it is a GPU with a vestigial CPU hanging off the side), but the only high
bandwidth off-chip interfaces are HDMI and USB 2, so it can just about
handle Fast Ethernet but doesn't have a hope of reliably sustaining low
latency at full line rate.

However it does demonstrate that a quad Cortex A7 CPU cluster is now very
cheap to implement. One of those integrated with a couple of GMACs and a
couple of PCIe lanes for Wi-Fi would make a good router SoC.

While I'm on the subject, I think the whole concept of web configurators is
wrong-headed. Give the box a little LCD and let the user plug a USB
keyboard in. Security problems solved (well, reduced a lot) at a stroke.

- Jonathan Morton
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