[Article/YouTube Suggestion] - Traverse Ten64

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lcreager

New Member
Nov 23, 2022
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While looking around for home router hardware for family which supports OpenWRT, I came across the Traverse Ten64

This is a bit outside of the scope of my original hardware search, but it seemed like it would be interesting to see how this platform compares to fanless i225 and i226 devices you have been recently reviewing.

The original Ten64 seems to have been released several years ago with a couple of revisions and active software development. See the documentation here.

I poked around youtube, the forums, and the main site search and did not see anyone talking about this platform.
 

oneplane

Well-Known Member
Jul 23, 2021
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I think the Ten64 itself might not be that interesting on its own, but the platform it is actually built on (Layerscape) is somewhat interesting but sadly has been so slow to appear in reasonable products that it has been surpassed by basic Celeron-based systems for a while now.

Perhaps it can be useful as a co-processor on a DPU, but even then there are better chips out there. It seems to me that the Layerscape platform will go the same route as the Marvell (Armada 385 I think) ones did; one or two revisions and then radio silence where only highly integrated partners still keep using it. For NXP it might make sense to keep it around since it fits nicely into their portfolio, but for everyone else it's too little, too late (especially when considering that it's not powerful enough as a CPU, and the hardware acceleration suffers from the same problems that basic Broadcom SoCs and higher-end ASIC-accelerators do: they get outdated and useless rather quickly... anyone remember VIA Padlock or Blackfin?).

If they could come up with something like a SolidRun SOM-based model and plain PCIe, that'd be a different story, but even then we're talking "management CPU"-class modules, where ironically the LX2 models have on-board SERDES that seems to be aimed at fabric connections for actual workhorses like the StrataXGS, so even natively it painted itself into a corner of "too much for management, too little for workhorse". Ripping out the SERDES and adding more PCIe lanes would flip this around, and with the 32GB RAM you could see a solid edge compute SoC. It would need a small clock boost and suddenly you have something that sits between a Pi 4 and an Ampere Altra. Sadly, an LX2 NXP Layerscape SoC on its own is over $500 (at scale!), so price-wise, it would still be moot.