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Keenen

New Around Here
Looking at buying a new wireless router. I've been looking at the Netgear R7000 with the intention of flashing it with Vortex's ASUS Merlin port. But before pulling the trigger on that, I wanted to get the forums opinion on other routers? Is it worth going all the way up to the AC3200 boys?

Current set of devices:

MacBook Pro
MacBook Air
2 - iPad Air 2's
2 - iPhone 6's
AppleTV
Chromecast (Latest one that just released)
Gaming Desktop (ASUS AC1900 wireless adapter)
Nest Thermostat

Future purchases:

New AppleTV (Whenever it actually releases)
Nest Smoke Detectors

I'm sure there is stuff that I've forgotten but this is the gist of it.

Thanks!
 
It depends on how much LAN traffic you expect. Remember that the practical bandwidth of wifi is 30%-50% of its theoratical value and that it depends on how many channels AC clients have and interference. If you have many AC clients and lots of LAN traffic than the AC3200 or even the newer MU-MIMO is something to look at or if you have really really fast internet. Realistically 2 channels of AC is 867Mb/s so if you have more than 200Mb/s of internet and a few AC wifi clients than it is justified to get more AC wifi bandwidth.

The AC3200 and higher all use dual radios. The AC3200 is just 2 AC1900 so the most you're going to get from a single client is the same as an AC1900 but is faster if you have multiple clients only for the 5Ghz. it also depends on the area you have to cover and how that you need more wifi clients. You really need to find out which of your clients use wireless AC and just using ethernet is definitely faster.

I actually wire my entire network and use wifi as a convenience and for mobile devices. Even laptops if i put it on a desk i just use gigabit ethernet instead.
 
Most of the devices listed are AC devices minus the Nest and the current AppleTV. Unfortunately, we rent right now and don't have the luxury of running ethernet everywhere or I would do that in most cases. I have 75/75 from FiOS so definitely not hitting that 200mb/s mark.

I had also considered making the investment into something like Ubiquiti or even Meraki (I can get Meraki at an 80% discount) in preparation for buying a house next year.
 
Ok taking in to Internet speeds r7k is good but will there be frequent sharing of files between macs via connected storage like planning for Time machine kind of. None of isp except Google fiber need more than ac1900 but as mu mimo being wave 2 future ready but again even r7k 2x bridge will be less than new mimo based setup again coverage.

Sent from my ASUS_Z00AD using Tapatalk
 
Don't really do a ton of file sharing to my Macs, I do have a Synology DSplay415 that acts as my usenet box / Plex Media server. Are you saying that R7k is future proof?
 
if you can get 80% discount with meraki and it is AC wifi it would be better to go with it. At your speeds MIPS based routers will struggle if you rely on software NAT but hardware NAT will have no issues, it is merely a question of QoS and firewall.

You can also go with seperate router + AP where you can get a meraki for wifi and a wired only router like ubiquiti but avoid the edgerouters that use usb flash.

Comparing the edgerouter's dual core 64 bit MIPS to broadcom ARM A9 in the r7000 and others the 64 bit MIPS is actually faster per clock but is clocked lower than the ARM. The edgerouter X uses single core 32 bit MIPS like alot of other routers. Edgerouters can also do hardware acceleration with configs so you can do QoS with ipv4 acceleration but dont expect gigabit throughputs. The fastest NAT speed recorded for the ERL is 1.3Gb/s while vendor testing says above 800Mb/s both using hardware acceleration so it wont struggle without acceleration for your speeds.

Remember that you want NAT throughput for internet whereas large networks and ISPs use layer 3 hence the speeds used to match their markets. The ERL's wirespeed throughput is if you were using layer 3 routing which is what almost any MIPS based router will do if you feed it layer 3 instead of NAT.

If you want VPN speeds at your internet speeds you will need a very different router instead that requires a lot of skill to set up.
 
Every architecture is good for different things. ARM beats MIPS for doing math but MIPS beats ARM for networking. When you want VPN and configuration complexity PPC beats the lot but x86 is still the fastest in all catogaries. Bit count dont really matter though except for high bit count encryption if there are no accelerators. You will see the broadcom ARM A9 beating 32 bit MIPS routers but in truth if you were to pit them together with the same clocks and the same cores you will find that the MIPS 24K is faster than ARM per clock in networking.

Than there is another catogary of performance per watt which x86 loses at.

There are a lot of different MIPS architectures which you can see from the numbering at the back i.e. 24k. Higher numbers usually indicate a more complex MIPS. If it really does have a dual core 64 bit MIPS it might be worth considering but than again the company does make 8 core 64 bit MIPS so now its time to look for an inexpensive variant of it that can be overclocked.

Bit count doesnt matter because it only represents the largest dataset accepted by a single instruction and larger datasets will have an instruction following it or be split up depending on the compiler. For networking all you're doing is just changing addresses and doing lookups so you dont need 64 bit there. It also represents the instruction size incase the CPU has more instructions which is why the x86 benefits from 64 bit because it can have a lot more instructions, newer SSEs and other units as well that you've seen.
 
Every architecture is good for different things. ARM beats MIPS for doing math but MIPS beats ARM for networking. When you want VPN and configuration complexity PPC beats the lot but x86 is still the fastest in all catogaries. Bit count dont really matter though except for high bit count encryption if there are no accelerators. You will see the broadcom ARM A9 beating 32 bit MIPS routers but in truth if you were to pit them together with the same clocks and the same cores you will find that the MIPS 24K is faster than ARM per clock in networking.

MIPS has it's strengths - but these days, with the consumer grade SoC's, the chipset vendors are looking at getting more chips from a wafer, and the older MIPS blocks didn't scale down to smaller geometry nodes - so as vendors did their die shrinks, the Cortex-A9 (or their own inhouse ARMv7 cores like Armada/Krait) made a lot of sense...

Going upmarket, MIPS still has a very strong presence in the SME space - Cavium is a great example here...

PPC - Two main vendors out there - AMCC and Freescale - AMCC seems to be more focused on legacy support for embedded designs that other PowerPC vendors have walked away from (and doing good business there) and then with Freescale - their PPC QoIRQ chipset tend to be focused on specific verticals - and they're pretty spendy compared to what is found with MIPS/ARM - but I agree, PowerPC, while not having huge success in certain market segments, are very powerful solutions

X86 - AMD/Intel pretty much - would be nice to see one of them jump into the Consumer AP/Router space, but their attention is really focused on other segments - Bobcat/Jaguar/Puma (AMD) and Silvermont/Airmont (Intel), we see them in NAS and Mediaplayers - and AMD's success with XBone/PS4 is well known - The Dual/Quad Intel Silvermont (Airmont) SoC's - in the SNB space, they're typically in NAS boxes and STB's, along with AMD's G-Series (Puma cores with a lightweight GPU).

The big challenge with the Intel/AMD small cores is pricing - typically the SoC's run between 75 to 105 USD, which is plainly too expensive for a consumer grade Router/AP - compared to Cortex-A9 (and MIPS) solutions in the sub-$20 range...

Intel does have one X86 core (other than Quarks, and nobody should go there for a router/AP) that is sub-20 bucks - and that is the Z-series Z-3735G, a table chip, which loses PCIe, SATA, USB3 and enables only a single memory controller - not suitable for a Router/AP - however they work great as STB processors in the mini-PC realm (they boot Linux/Android/Win8, 10 in 32bit mode) and run great multi-media apps (KODI, Plex, etc) and do it well... note that Intel is discounting that chip signficiantly compared to other Quad Silvermonts (to the order of about $60 a chip) as they're all pretty close die size wise..

I would really like to see Intel jump into this space, but since they're already pulling shedloads of money from the market segments they're in, it's their call perhaps... but if they put their mind to it, it would be a compelling solution.

Going into 32/64 bit - mixed bag, but generally 64-bit in ARM/X86 do offer advantages over their 32-bit ancestors - better/newer instruction pipelines, more registers, better capabilities at memory management and manipulation...

I do think, that sometime in 2016, we'll likely see a Router/AP System on Chip that is 64-bit - and most like ARMv8 based - could be QC/Atheros, or Broadcom perhaps, and don't rule out Marvell..
 
for other tasks having a 64 bit CPU does help since routers do more nowadays than just routing. Both intel and AMD have their own embedded systems for routers which is what pfsense sells and what you can buy with multiple NICs although as long as AMD doesnt use realtek NICs it is a capable CPU too. The only thing that slows AMD down is their realtek chipset requiring more CPU whether it is sound, networking or anything else that they do but it does make them cheaper.

64 bit chips are bigger than 32 bit chips in how much wafer it requires .

A single memory controller is enough for the router segment since even the edgerouter pro, RB1100AHx2 and the CCR1009 only use a single memory controller/channel since they only have 1 Dimm.

What i really would like to see are more PCIe lanes, SATA and such in the consumer router segment and ofcourse more ports considering that routers are getting bigger and with the increasing cost of a new router (similar to what GPU companies do) they could at least add more ports.

Its too bad we cant install other programs on a mikrotik routerboard, it would be interesting to run plex on a CCR1072 considering it has 72 cores but plex could benefit from GPU acceleration since even now all the recent intel chips except the intel extreme and most AMD boards/chips have a GPU onboard that can run openCL and have media encoders as well. The power savings from using a GPU or hardware acceleration for media encoding is well worth it. I remember 5 years ago a lot of phones had hardware media encoding/decoding whereas the ARM based routers dont have those useful features and instructions that would really benefit.

If you consider now a lot of ISPs also have TV so you would end up with a modem, router and a tv box when you could have all 3 in the same device and save power and cost.
 

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