Has anyone made any comparison between a RB1000 and a Intel Atom powered board?

Intel® Desktop Board D945GSEJT (Atom 270 - single Core) 12v powered

Intel® Desktop Board D945GCLF2/D945GCLF2D (Atom 330 - Dual Core)

Or a complete Supermicro Atom server like this one:

1U Supermicro X7SLA-H Intel Atom 1.6GHz Dual Core
Chipset: Intel® 945GC Chipset
Dimensions: 1U x 19" x 9.6" Depth
1. Intel® Atom™ 330 Dual-Core 1.6GHz 533FSB
2. 2GB DDR2 667 SDRAM
3. 1x PCI-Express x8 Slot
4. 2x Realtek RTL8111C-GR Gigabit LAN
5. Intel® ICH7R 4-Port SATA 3.0Gbps Controller
6. 1 x 3.5" Internal Drive Bay
7. Onboard GMA950 Video Controller
8. 200W Low-Noise High-efficiency Power Supply
9. 80GB Seagate SATA-II 3.5IN 7200RPM 8MB
Motherboard Manufacturer Page
Chassis Manufacturer Page

At the incredible price of $310

Adding a level 4 license (i don't level 6 license of rb1000 in most of my servers nor more than two ethernet adapters) will give me $355 half the price of a rb1000. But, I'm really wondering about performance.


Any tests will be really appreciated.

Esteban.

atom is mikrotik compatible?

do you think that mikrotik will be sick if running on Atom? it's just another x86 processor...

just add in power usage of your router over the course of few years that it will be in service and add in maintenance for moving parts and card with additional 2 ports. also,

not to speak about general purpose CPU vs network optimised CPU

is it really worth it?

not to speak about general purpose CPU vs network optimised CPU

That was the original question. Are you saying that the Atom based unit would not perform equably or better than a RB1000?

Janisk:
The subject of your quote is exactly the information that I'm looking for. I know that RB1000 is a very reliable product with a "network optimized cpu" but I also know that running RouterOS in intel hardware is also very reliable though its' processor is a general purpose cpu. I supose that intel Core2Duo or Xeon can be even more powerfull than a RB1000.

So once again what I'm looking for is if there are any test about performance comparing a RB1000 with an Intel Atom. I would like to know if an intel atom would performe more like a RB600 or a RB1000 or is in the middle of them.

These two types of hardware can't be compared as such, RB1000 is designed as networking platform and has almost nothing in common with "desktop boards" like this one with atom CPU. The RB1000 is optimized for IPSec encryption with onboard addons, while atom board will have to use all CPU resources to provide that feature. Not to mentions that if you want to use this Atom board as a PPPoE concentrator than you will need L6 license since L4 supports only 200 PPPoE tunnels, L5 500 while L6 unlimited, for your information I have e RB1000 running with 660 PPPoE clients online.

Regards

Faton

fatonk:
There are several other uses for a routeros server where you don't need a level 6 licence. like a firewall with complex layer 7 analysis with mangle rules and several queues, or a proxy server, or a bgp router, or whatever. In these cases you only need processor power and two gigabit interfaces. and for these cases we used two have two choices intel (core2 or xeon) or a rb1000 with similar prices, but now there is a new alternative half the price of the previous ones. the only fact is that I don't know if it has comparable processor power.

I'm not saying that an atom server is better than a rb1000 I'm only trying seek if it is capable to run these applications like the rb1000 can.

Esteban

as u can see.. no body has tested yet.. so why dont u try it and share that information?

We are testing with a dual core Atom 330. Hardware cost with 1U case is $410, measured power consumption 36W. Case is only 8" deep with PCI slot, compactflash, space for 2.5" HDD. www.idotpc.com case with MSI IM-945GC motherboard.

Unfortunately there is a weird problem with the onboard NICs where UDP traffic is limited to 200 Mbit/s upload. They are RTL8111C devices. Perhaps this will be corrected with a future version of RouterOS. Otherwise the routing throughput is 600+ Mbit using TCP. An Intel Pro/1000 card gets 600+ Mbit/s UDP upload.

IPSEC ESP-SHA-1 AES-128 VPN is around 80 Mbit/s - this is only using one core (25% CPU usage of 4 CPUs) so perhaps multiple VPNs could be run together at a similar speed, although I don't have enough devices to test this.

Any idea of RB1000 performance for a similar IPSEC connection?

Via nano has hardware encryption support, and is simmilar to atom procesor.
Also i think, go with core 2 duo/quad. The have better power consumption/performance ratio, than atom and probably better than rb1000 withouth ipsec.
BTW i was shocked to hear that router OS began to support that hardware ipsec chip on rb1000 thair own product. That was after two years of rb1000 release? Anyone knows?

make sure your RB1000 is up to date, with encryption engine turned on IPsec performance climbs from 80Mbit to 500Mbit:
http://www.mikrotik.com/pdf/newsletter15.pdf

I know that, i was saying that the encrypcion chip began to work after a long time, after rb1000 release.