On 6/2/22 10:11, David P. Reed wrote:
There are small, low-TDP Intel systems for up to ~$250 or so (including
case) that use current generation Celerons with 4 2.5 GigE ports, and
with the I/O bandwidth to easily support a full-on router at wirespeed
on those ports.
I'm thinking of upgrading my entry-router (which is based on Fedora
Server 36 now, not Cerowrt, just because that's my general go-to distro
on x86_64 and Aarch64) from an old Celeron system with two full speed 1
GigE ports to 2.5 GigE, in advance of my expectation that 2.5 GigE
DOCSIS 3.1 will become cheap enough soon at my home.
The problem with the low-end boards is that you need enough PCIe lanes
to move packets at 10 Gb/sec bidirectionally. The contained ARM chips
may be fast enough in principle, but the board and the PCIe are a
bottleneck.
AliExpress sells such boards and also barebones, but prices and specs vary.
The ones I see there seem to be using Celeron N5090 or N5105. Both have
"PCI Express 3.0 controller supporting 8 lanes (multiplexed); 4 lanes
available externally"
They all seem to be using
"4x Intel i225-V"
Apparently earlier revs of that had problems but the "B3" stepping is
supposed to be fixed.
Each uses pci-e 3.1 x1. So depending on how the board is laid out, they
should have the bandwidth to actually do 2.5Gbit. All the usb ports,
wifi, graphics, etc should all be using the internal lanes I think.
Here is a comparison of those celerons, the nanopi, and the pi4
https://www.cpubenchmark.net/compare/ROC-RK3568-PC-HDMI-(Android)-vs-BCM2711-vs-Intel-Celeron-N5105-vs-Intel-Celeron-N5095/4752vs4297vs4412vs4472
more details on the specific pages. The nanopi seems mostly better than
the pi4, except some floating point and matrix.
The Celerons are much better CPUs, but are in a different power
consumption and price class.
--
Matt Taggart
m...@lackof.org
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