Price?

I just wanted to say 'thank you' for this reply. For someone who just dabbled a bit in OpenWrt and OPNsense, it's very insightful. I guess I was slightly misled because some vendors call both types of offloading together 'NPU' in their marketing. At any rate, I hope the general point was clear though, that even with old Cortex cores, a device could still be pretty good as a router.