CPU score? What does it really mean?

[Greg_E]

I'm testing on an HP T740 with AMD Ryzen V1756B (4 cores,8 threads), Liteon 120GB SATA m.2 SSD (cheap at about $6), and 8gb of ram, still just barely staggering through getting the interfaces up after some problems getting BSD to properly load on this hardware.

So I installed Zenarmor, mostly so I could see what the CPU score was, and got this value: 636542.

Doing a little searching I've found that an Intel N100 gave a 8xxxxx score yet passmark rates the AMD processor as faster than the n100 in single and multithread...

I guess my question is, does my score of 636542 mean this is a decent processor?

I'm probably going to buy a larger pair of ram modules and push it up to 16 or 32 (depends on price). My needs are under 100 workstations and gigabit maximum speed right now.

[meyergru]

Your CPU seems to be in the same ballpark as an N100, however the specific scores depend heavily on what you measure, thus real-world speed may differ. That depends on # of threads vs. MHz, modern instructions sets with AES-NI or SSE for VPN and so on.

With these types of CPUs, you can expect 1 Gbps routing speed, provided that you do not use something like zenarmor or want the same speed over a VPN.

[Seimus]

I will just add here,

That score is just a way how ZenArmor simply calculates if it even can handle the ZenEngine and DBs they use for it. But as @meyergru said real world usage depends.

ZenArmor currently doesn't use multi-core, its bind to one CPU, which in the end is resolving capping your throughput. They currently favor a faster single CPU vs multicore. Multi-core support for ZenArmor should come this year (at least per they Roadmap). I was told by them that potentially end of Q1 could be when they ship multi-core support.

https://www.zenarmor.com/roadmap

If you want to see what theoretical speed you can achieve they have a table for it in regards of single core performance.

https://www.zenarmor.com/docs/introduction/hardware-requirements

I have a N5105 and can hit 1G with ZenArmor. Hopefully they will be able to deliver multi-core support so I can hit above that as I have a 2x1G LAG on the LAN side.

Regards,
S.

[cookiemonster]

I read yesterday the timeline has slipped for now. Seems 2025 for multithread for Zenarmor.

[Seimus]

I read yesterday the timeline has slipped for now. Seems 2025 for multithread for Zenarmor.

Thats a bit disappointing....

By 2025 I may have already upgraded my HW to a stronger SOC. Which will fix the throughput cap for me, lol.

Regard,
S.

[almodovaris]

I have a N100 router. It does Gigabit Zenarmor without problem. On OPNsense, it's out of the box, on Debian you have to install tlp in order to get Gigabit Zenarmor.

[cookiemonster]

I read yesterday the timeline has slipped for now. Seems 2025 for multithread for Zenarmor.

Thats a bit disappointing....

By 2025 I may have already upgraded my HW to a stronger SOC. Which will fix the throughput cap for me, lol.

Regard,
S.

This is the one I read it on, hopefully I misread it:

Hi All,

We needed to make a bit of differences in our roadmap due to SSE and SASE features. It is kept in roadmap but it seems at the end of this year or at the first quarter of next year.

[Greg_E]

I must have missed that post, the last update I saw suggested quarter 4 of 2024, guess it slipped again.

On pfsense, I chose Suricata over Snort because Suricata was multithread, so I won't say this is not important.