3 or 4 cores?

[stevenm]

Lower priced RT-AX3000 has 4 cores, and the higher priced RT-AX5400 has 3 cores.
What am I missing here?

 

[L&LD]

The speed of those cores and the capabilities (enabled/or not) of the SoC used with them.

In general, the 3 core SoCs were pretty much garbage when I tested them when they were 'new'.

 

[Tech9]

What am I missing here?

The RT-AX3000 model you are looking at is V2 version with newer BCM6756 CPU and built-in* 2-stream radios.

The higher positioned AX5400-class router is using the older** BCM6750 CPU + BCM43684 5GHz 4-stream radio.

* - up to AX3000-class products
** - real world CPU performance is about the same

 

[Adooni]

better have 1 good core than 4-10 week ones
OpenVPN is using one core and cloak make difference. I tis all depend of feature you are using

for example I have Xeon e3-1265 that speed of 1 core is half of i3 305 CPU but it is still good enough for 1Gbit speed. I have Proxmox OPNsense and NAS with torrents on it and can download torrents at 110-120MB/s (1Gbit LAN)

what I notice for 3 cores in routers very often 1 core is used for wi-fi

 

[Volt]

Higher-priced models often use SoC purely as a CPU or additionally for 2.4 GHz Wi-Fi only. For example, RT-AX56U with BCM6755 (4 cores) uses SoC for 2.4 and 5 GHz Wi-Fi, while RT-AX82U V2 with BCM6750 (3 cores) uses SoC for 2.4 GHz Wi-Fi only and a stand-alone (and quite powerful) BCM6715 chip for 5GHz. But that's not always the case.