"The best reasonably priced router is mips. (Ubiquiti EdgeRouter Lite). Got stuff that you don't normally get under £1000"
Kudos to them for building a good router. But that's the bit that counts.
How much of that could (not) have been done with ARM Inside, and does it matter whether it's ARM, MIPS, or whatever?
I've not looked at network-centric SoCs for quite a while so what follows may be dated (I didn't even know Cavium had bought MontaVista, presumably for their embedded + realtime MontaVista Linux product family which I have used in the past).
This Ubiquiti box looks like a Cavium http://www.cavium.com/OCTEON-Plus_CN50XX.html) plus a relatively widely available open source software package, right? The SoC looks like a fairly generic router-centric SoC, with one exception: it's a 64bit (MIPS64, specifically) SoC rather than a 32bit SoC.
ARM (and partners) can't really do 64bit yet. Does a router need 64bit? I can't say. But apparently this one works well. Does it work well because it's MIPS? Because it's 64bit? Because it's based on a nice SoC which just happens to be 64bit?
Meanwhile, back to the main news: there are already various MIPS SoC designers out there (some better known than Cavium, e.g. who hasn't heard of Broadcom?). How does the Imagination Technologies deal affect them now the dust has had time to settle? The article made little (no?) mention of SoC design partners. Did something fall off the press release?
ARM (and partners) make nice stuff. But there may well be room for others too. Who wants to design the first Atom-ased SoHo router? Hmmm, thought not.