Taking a break off the usual testing and catching up some rest, I'm back with more reporting
Since I'm on the dual core ARM Cortex A9, some might wonder is there a need for routers to move to multi cores to provide better performance? IMHO, it's definitely
YES in our local context especially for FTTH aka Fiber users and the multiple tasks that users use their routers these days
Up for thoughts and discussion
Just quoting some interesting quotes from RMerlin for the night and some updates.
The areas where this new CPU will be of benefit:
- People using the VPN server (either Asus's PPTP, or Tomato/A-M OpenVPN)
- People with a lot of clients sharing files over USB
- People who can't use HW acceleration because they use QoS. (lack of HW acceleration drops max WAN speed from 700+ Mbps to around 150 Mbps on an RT-N66U, about 240 Mbps on an RT-AC56U).
Note that the R6250 does not have both CPU cores enabled, so it's not a good test case.. No idea about the DLink/Linksys products.
I can see in the latest FW code I got from Asus last week that they are making efforts to specifically optimize the FW for taking advantage of the two CPU cores.
The faster CPU will not have a big impact on your actual wireless performance, but it will have a measurable effect for people heavily using a shared USB disk or using features that disables HW acceleration.
Netgear specifically states on their site that the R6250 has a dual core cpu.
'The dual-core 800 MHz processor delivers high-performance connectivity'
Maybe the other core comes online under heavy load only?
No. It was deliberately disabled by them. I got confirmation of it from an inside source.
Same thing with the missing 128 MB of RAM - router should have 256 MB, but Netgear only enabled the first 128 MB.
29/06/2013
Under a week's time since his ASUS RT-AC56U 3.0.0.4.372.30 beta 2 firmware, RMerlin has released his 3.0.0.4.372.30 beta 3. Numerous bugs fixes are done @ nvram level and by far it's the most comprehensive customised next generation Broadcom dual core ARM Cortex A9 DDWRT firmware.
As we are kinda running out of bugs to find
so the next stage for us to correlate stability tests and results.
IPv6 6to4
I was sidetracked in trying out the IPv6 6to4 using HE tunnelbroker on SingTel Fiber as well