[zokier]

Does Allwinner actually manufacture router-oriented chips? Ralink (now owned by MediaTek) has been making networking parts for over 10 years now.

> The only non open hardware on Allwinner chips is the ARM-licensed Mali GPU

I seriously doubt that any part of Allwinners chips can be classified as open hardware. Just to clarify, this is wikipedias view on what open (source) hardware means:

> The term usually means that information about the hardware is easily discerned. Hardware design (i.e. mechanical drawings, schematics, bills of material, PCB layout data, HDL source code and integrated circuit layout data), in addition to the software that drives the hardware, are all released with the FOSS approach.

> Both are very inexpensive Chinese chip manufacturers that use ARM-licensed MCUs

The chip in this device has a MIPS core. Besides, MCU != IP-core != SoC.

[eric_bullington]

I should have differentiated between "open source hardware" and open hardware. By using the later term, I meant to describe hardware that uses open source software to drive the hardware, and that can be easily modified.

And I screwed up with my description of this project -- you're right that it's a MIPS not ARM core. Sorry about that.