Usually I can grok the significance of almost any item on HN that catches my eye, but here I'm at a loss. Can someone explain why this matters?
As far as I can tell, someone has figured out how to send Ethernet packets at a relatively high rate using hardware with very limited CPU. Cool, but what can you _do with that_? If the RPi Pico has the juice to run interesting network _application-level traffic_ at line rate it's more intriguing, but I doubt that anyone's going to claim that can serve web traffic at line rate on this device, for example.
Its quite popular in the retro-computing scene, for example, to bring these old machines into the 21st century with modern microcontrollers being used to add peripheral support.
For example, the Oric-1/Atmos computers recently got a project called "LOCI" which adds USB support to the 40-year old computer[1], by using an RP2040's PIO capabilities to interface the 8-bit DATA bus with a microcontroller capable of acting as the 'gateway' to all of the devices on the USB peripheral bus.
This is amazing, frankly.
And now, being able to do Ethernet in such a simple way means that hundreds of retro-computing platforms could be put on the Internet with relative ease ..
RP2040/2350 are IO monsters. You could for example make a logic analyzer that transfers logic data through ethernet.
This "very limited" microcontroller has two cores. Both of them can execute about 25 instructions per byte for generating "application-level traffic". You could definitely saturate a 100 Mbps connection with just one core.
Now that you mention it, I think I would like to see a logic analyzer that does just that. No buffering, just straight up shovel the data to a mac address, or even IP address, and be done with it (maybe lose a few frames here and there). Let the PC worry about what to do with it, like triggers etc.
Should be cheap, right? Though 1Gbit version might still be expensive..
How is this different from the cheap salae clones now? Just sub out Ethernet for usb and that’s how they work now: a cheap ic with nothing but a2d and a usb phy samples and sends as fast as it can..
As far as I can tell, someone has figured out how to send Ethernet packets at a relatively high rate using hardware with very limited CPU. Cool, but what can you _do with that_? If the RPi Pico has the juice to run interesting network _application-level traffic_ at line rate it's more intriguing, but I doubt that anyone's going to claim that can serve web traffic at line rate on this device, for example.
What am I missing?