But it should be about the buses these boards expose shouldn't it? Even the pi4 still has Ethernet over USB which is unnecessary overhead. Getting access to the

But it should be about the buses these boards expose shouldn't it? Even the pi4 still has Ethernet over USB which is unnecessary overhead. Getting access to the PCIe lanes directly would be interesting for this. I just researched a bit and it looks like there are boards with SATA port from hardkernel that completely saturate the 1gbit port, so the question is how much faster they could go, and whether it uses a USB bridge too. In general, saturating 10gbit on any x86 from the past couple years isn't a problem. Doing it with a single TCP connection is a bit tricky and requires some tweaking, and jumbo frames help too, but a simple threaded server pushing out data via sendfile to multiple clients easily gets the job done. But yes, I agree that this is not a useful use case for SBCs, one of these things I'd just want to build because I can, not because I should.