2010/10/11 Stuart Henderson <stu@spacehopper.org>:
quoted text
> Someone else replied offlist which I thought was worth responding
> to here,
>
>>On 2010-10-10, Stuart Henderson <stu@spacehopper.org> wrote:
[snip]
quoted text
>>> The CPU and chipset are way too slow to handle wire-speed gigabit.
>>> You'll be better off with an Atom, VIA, or probably even a 350MHz PII.
>>>
>>
>>Alix is very best ! AMD Geode 500Mhz processor. PII is one dinosaur
>>.....
>
> It's not just about the clock speed of the CPU. Lots of other things
> affect network forwarding performance (cache, memory bandwidth, pci
> controller, type of NICs).
>
> There are some fairly good cheap low-power geode gx/lx-based systems,
> but I'm honestly surprised you even get 150Mb/s through them.
Thanks,
I missed the offlist thing for reasons that I either hit reply button
too quickly or fell into the bit bucket and I didn't look into it.
I'm using routerboard 44GV card with 4 gigabit interfaces.
The test I did was over ftp/sftp to one of the boxes in the home lab.
mtu is about 1492 and I'm able to get gigabit speed between the lab
boxes as they are cross-hooked into two procurve gigabit switches /
the ones with 8 ports/ for  simulating redundancy and do not go to the
alix box, but switch only.
Thought of switching the routerboard 44GV to quad gigabit intel, but
if I'm going to invest such amount of money, better get one more horse
powered one.
Unfortunately most of the embedded boxes I've seen come with realtek chipset.
Yet the joy is that if you make your pick correctly you will get a PCI
and plug your existing adapter/ get a new one.
So seems that I will have to migrate to something more powerful if I
want to have gigabit everywhere.
Could you give recommendations for something in Europe/ reasonable
shipping costs to EU?

I'm thinking of the following options:
#1 http://www.bvm-store.com/ProductDetail.asp?fdProductId=344
#2 http://nexcom.kd85.com or something similar
#3 http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=embedded+quad+gigabit&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org....

Thanks for your help and happy sailing!
Best regards,
Dimitar