[dlenski]

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.

What am I missing?

[boffinAudio]

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 ..

[1] - https://forum.defence-force.org/viewtopic.php?t=2593&sid=2d3...

[vardump]

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.

[_flux]

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..

[eternityforest]

Can't you do reads with very basic compression faster than most of these chips can push data to Ethernet?

[baby_souffle]

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..

[_flux]

It would be over the network :), which is—I imagine—tiny bit simpler than over USB.