Marvell Kirkwood Series - CPU Limitations.

[iwod]

The Kirkwood Series used in the latest Buffalo, Qnap 219, and Synology DS209, Seagate 220, and lots of other NAS.

According to Synology it is an 16bit CPU ( I have doubt on that ) running in 800Mhz to 1 - 1.2Ghz.

Even an iPhone 3GS CPU is 2 Generation ahead of it.

They could afford to put an Atom inside NAS. Why not ARM Cortex A8? I am sure it would still be much cheaper then Intel's solutions.

 

[thiggins]

I believe that the CPU core is 32 or 64. But the memory bus interface is only 16 bit.
Download this and this white paper for more details.

NAS processor selection is based on tradeoff between price, performance and power. Different manufacturers have different priorities.

 

[iwod]

I believe that the CPU core is 32 or 64. But the memory bus interface is only 16 bit.
Download this and this white paper for more details.

NAS processor selection is based on tradeoff between price, performance and power. Different manufacturers have different priorities.

Thanks for the links, never knew the Marvell chips were so expensive. Intel Definitely gave the best price to performance ratio here. ( Which means they are making more money from Intel Atom based NAS )