this post was submitted on 26 Jun 2024
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I got this AP for free, and had some fun trying to configure it, and I decided to look at the inside of this thing. It has a PowerPC processor, pretty cool!

It is a Cisco Aironet 1131AG

More pics:

It's an old AP from around 2007, I managed to get the latest firmware thanks to some guy on the Internet Archive (thank god they exists) ! ( https://archive.org/download/cIOS-firmware-images/ )

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[–] litchralee 10 points 1 month ago (1 children)

It never ceases to amaze me how prolific PowerPC/PowerISA was (still is?) in the embedded space

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Me too! but now it has this weird "retro" feel when you stumble upon something powered by a PowerPC processor

[–] litchralee 3 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

Agreed. When I was fresh out of university, my first job had me debugging embedded firmware for a device which had both a PowerPC processor as well as an ARM coprocessor. I remember many evenings staring at disassembled instructions in objdump, as well as getting good at endian conversions. This PPC processor was in big-endian and the ARM was little-endian, which is typical for those processor families. We did briefly consider synthesizing one of them to match the other's endianness, but this was deemed to be even more confusing haha