Traverse Ten64

Most boxes with eight Ethernet jacks put a switch chip behind them. The ports talk to each other in silicon, and the processor sees one link into the pile. The Ten64 does not work that way. Its ten ports, eight gigabit RJ45 and two 10-gigabit SFP+, are ten independent controllers, each presented to the CPU by a datapath block inside the NXP LS1088A that moves frames at wire rate so the eight Cortex-A53 cores never have to touch a packet they were not asked to. NXP calls that arrangement DPAA2. The practical result is a board where a router actually routes, because nothing downstream is quietly bridging the traffic you meant to inspect.

It did not arrive from nowhere. Traverse Technologies, a small outfit in Melbourne, had already built a networking board around the older NXP LS1043 and called it the Five64, with a later OEM prototype iteration named LS1043S through 2017 and 2018. The Ten64 was announced on 20 September 2019 as its replacement, moving to the newer eight-core LS1088A instead of continuing the older design. The Crowd Supply campaign went live on 30 September 2020 and closed that November, funded to roughly twice its US$60,000 goal. Production then ran into the usual 2021 supply trouble: a shortage on a handful of the roughly 170 lines in the bill of materials, plus Chinese New Year shutdowns, pushed delivery from February toward April. The boards passed FCC and EU EMC testing, the first production run was built in Malaysia without rework wires, and most orders shipped by mid-2021. International shipments were held up by US export-control paperwork, because the LS1088A’s onboard crypto acceleration is enough to trigger the extra review.

Traverse has kept at it. The Ten64’s Rev C schematics are published under CC BY-SA 4.0, the whole board rather than a marketing diagram, and the firmware still lives in the open on GitLab, where the image-building tooling has gone on collecting commits and releases well after the campaign closed. The line has since grown a hardened, extended-temperature Ten64 XE and a fanless Ten64 FE, both on the same LS1088A platform. That a small vendor is still shipping firmware and answering its own forum years on is worth saying out loud, because it is not the usual ending for a crowdfunded board.

The one in the lab is the plain Ten64, bought as a bare board through Crowd Supply on 17 June 2021, while the first production run was still shipping. I took the 32 GB ECC memory option, which added $240 — the same figure the campaign listed for that add-on, so at least the receipt agrees with the record. Which board revision it carries I can’t tell you yet. It sits racked in an enclosure, and reading the silkscreen means unracking it and opening the case, which I have not done.

What it does so far is honest and small. I installed Linux on it and built a Hello World in C. That is the whole story to date. The plan is to give it real work in the release engineering platform — an arm64 build node with a lot of network in front of it — but for now it runs, and that is all I have asked of it.

A photo of the board or the enclosure, and the /proc/mtd reading that would settle the NAND flash size, are both still to be documented. They wait on the same unracking.

Sources: Traverse’s own Ten64 documentation and product pages, the NXP LS1088A product page, CNX Software’s launch coverage, the Crowd Supply campaign and its update history, and the firmware repositories on GitLab. The specifications, with a note on the figures that disagree across sources, are on the specifications page.