The LX2160A chip is indeed designed for router/firewall/VPN type appliances and this board is repurposing it (poorly) as a "workstation".

I had to look at this for an unrelated project, and its clear that chipset is for router/firewall use. The endstation features of the chip don't include very basic offloads like TSO.

For anyone else who does not know what TSO stands for, it is TCP segmentation offload.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Large_send_offload

The only TSO that came to my mind was IBM's Time Sharing Option, which is part of z/OS and has been part of their mainframe OSs since the 360.

It was obviously a poor match for the context ;-)

I'm all in for misusing server chips to build workstations, but the feature match is not great here.

While the board is advertising itself as a workstation, wouldn't it be easy to use it as a server?

If you scroll down on the page they sell a server that has two Honeycombs in 1U.

It looks like a good match for a small server, better than a workstation.

For $250 more you get quad 40GbE https://shop.solid-run.com/product/SRLX216S00D00GE064C08CH/

The qsfp28 port can be configured as 4x10Gbps or 1x40Gbps, or 4x25Gbps, 2x50Gbps, or 1x100Gbps. They are different signalling standards.

I'm seeing 4x10g + 1x100G in that link which is even funnier as it's starting to approach on the bandwidth to the RAM lol.

Given that ARM-chips have 128-bit NEON + AES-encryption at the core/chip level, you probably can push that bandwidth in a VPN-application without ever touching RAM.

Imagine a 1x100G WAN with encrypted traffic being routed to each of the 10g links based off of a simple application-specific decision. You can probably route that sort of thing without ever consulting main RAM at all.

Yeah, I'm liking this thing as a server-chip, but not so much a workstation. I think there's a lot of applications where a low-energy use CPU hanging off of high-speed fiber connections could be useful.

But I'm not entirely sure of any application that would benefit from the 16 cores, strangely enough.

The LX2160a has a 50Gbps crypto accelerator and a 100Gbps compression/decompression accelerator built into the network packet processor to help offload some of the processing. The 16-cores are useful for the high speed packet processing in userspace with DPDK.

Yeah, I was thinking that nevermind workstations, this could be good upgrade from APU2 as a router platform if you want to go beyond 1Gbe. Throw in some pcie wifi adapter (ax210 maybe?) and you got a pretty decent setup

We have a growing lineup of SystemReady ES certified hardware that will make good OSS upgrades. New platforms on our LX2162A based SOM will be especially good for this application.

please make a beefier SOM that fits the MNT Reform, those would be nice to have in a laptop :)

We are talking with MNT about possibly building around the LX2162a SOM.

What's the difference? The block diagram seems very similar.

The core count and network processing is the same, but the number of SERDES lanes is half. This allowed the SOC's die size to be much smaller. You can fit 4 SOMs in the space of a single CEX7 module.

> You can fit 4 SOMs in the space of a single CEX7 module.

Do they like multi-"socket" settings?

There is no backplane for the CPUs no. But they support 10 and 25Gbps networking that can be used for high speed clustering.

Now that you mention that, it's quite an upgrade over my idea of putting 32 Octavo easy to interface packages (you need to connect like 5 balls for what I want) along with a ethernet switch and make a cluster of 32 puny nodes...

The number 32 is important because a stack of boards should look like a Thinking Machines CM-2a (http://www.corestore.org/cm2a.htm) and each CPU would control one LED (or three - Octavo now has a 3-core, two puny, one even punier, part, ending up with only 10 nodes per board).

sounds interesting, great news!