Denys Fedoryshchenko <denys@visp.net.lb> writes:
Beaglebone has gigabit mac, but due some errata it is not used in gigabit mode, it is 100M (which is maybe enough for small office). But it is "hardware" mac.
The Beaglebone Black rev C BOM calls out the ethernet phy chip as LAN8710A-EZC-TR which is 10/100 so there's your constraint. The MAC is built into the SoC and according to the datasheet the AM3358B is 10/100/1000.
Another hardware MAC on inexpensive board it is Odroid-C1.
Difficulty: hardware MAC tells you nothing about how it's connected, either on the board or internally in the SoC. Ethernet on Multibus and Ethernet on PCIe (neither likely on an embedded ARM ;-) are both "hardware MAC" yet the bus-constrained bandwidths will differ by several orders of magnitude. -r