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Hardware and Performance / Re: Any issues with i210 / i211 & i350 on OPNSense 20.x ?
« on: February 06, 2021, 01:17:06 pm »
1) I simply dont understand why pcengines switched away from i210 and use i211 in their higher numbered APUs (APU4, APU5, APU6, these are not even listed on pcengines.ch, the secrecy inner workings of this swiss company is confusing as hell to me). As you all should be aware i211 is inferior to i210 (in contrast what the model number may suggest, bigger number != better product in this case). i210 supports 4 TX&RX queues per port, i211 has only 2 TX&RX queues per port. Is significant difference, because Receive Side Scaling can distribute incoming (TX) packets between the CPU cores, if there are as many queues as CPU cores. Otherwise only 1 or max. 2 cores will get all the processing work of the incoming packets, while the rest of the CPU cores will sit idle nothing to do. That is a real life issue above 100Mbit speed, as the APU 1Ghz AMD embedded CPU has very weak single core performance, and all 4 cores would be needed to process packets at 1Gbit, which is more or less impossible with the i211 nic in many of the APUs.
Pcengines does not seem to work on a future improvement on this dead horse APU design to put higher clocked AMD SoC in to the PCB, and replace i2xx with i3xx that already has 8 TX & RX queues per port.
Pcengines does not seem to work on a future improvement on this dead horse APU design to put higher clocked AMD SoC in to the PCB, and replace i2xx with i3xx that already has 8 TX & RX queues per port.