Dear Mikael,
> On Aug 24, 2018, at 00:32, Mikael Abrahamsson <swm...@swm.pp.se> wrote:
>
> On Thu, 23 Aug 2018, Sebastian Moeller wrote:
>
>> router should be able to handle at least the sold plan's bandwidth with its
>> main CPU...)
>
> There is exactly one SoC on the market that does this, and that's Marvell
> Armada 385, and it hasn't been very successful when it comes to ending up in
> these kinds of devices. It's mostly ended up in NASes and devices such as
> WRT1200AC, WRT1900ACS, WRT3200AC.
Intersting question, how will the intel grx750 perform
(https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/smart-home/connected-home/anywan-grx750-home-gateway-brief.html)
after all that is a SoC with a dual core atom CPU with up to 2.5 GHz frequency?
>
>> Sure doing less/ a half asses job is less costly than doing it right,
>> but in the extreme not doing the job at all saves even more energy ;). And I
>> am not sure we are barking up the right tree here, it is not that all home
>> CPE are rigorously optimized for low power and energy saving... my gut
>> feeling is that the only optimizing principle is cost for the
>> manufacturer/OEM and that causes underpowered CPU that are
>> packet-accerlerated"-doped to appear to be able to do their job. I might be
>> wrong though, as I have ISP internal numbers on this issue.
>
> The CPU power and RAM/flash has crept up a lot in the past 5 years because
> other requirements in having the HGW support other applications than just
> being a very simple NAT44+wifi router.
That matches my observation as well, people seem to want to concentrate
more functionality at the one device that needs to run 24/7 instead of using
multiple independent devices (and I do not want to blame them, even though I
believe from a robustness perspective it would be better to not concentrate
everything in the routing/firewall device).
>
> Cost is definitely an optimization, and when you're expected to have a
> price-to-customer including software in the 20-40 EUR/device range, then the
> SoC can't cost much. There has also been a lot of vendor lock-in.
Sure, but my ISP charged 4 EUR per month for the DSL-router that adds
up to 12*2*4 = 96 EUR over the 2 years contract duration and to 12*5*4 = 240
over my renting duration; assuming that my ISP does not need to make a profit
on this device (after all I am renting this to be able to consume internet and
telephone from them) that is considerably more that 20-40 EUR. This is
especially farcical since until a few years ago the dsl-routers have been given
for "free" and when they switched to mandatory renting the baseplan price was
not reduced by the same amount. I guess what I want to convey is while cost is
imprtant it is not a goo d excuse to distribute underpowered devices....
>
> But now speeds are creeping up even more, we're now seeing 2.5GE and 10GE
> platforms, which require substantial CPU power to do forwarding.
Well, it is all swell if a router delivers 2.5/5/10 Gbps on the LAN
side, but a) I know only few households that would profit from that and b) at
that speeds short-comings of a router become even more obvious and c) bandplans
to actually feed such a beast from the wan side seem expensive enough that the
customer should also be able to pay for a competent router (one can get intel
based multicore atom boards at the same price point as the high-end homerouters
at ~250EUR).
> The Linux kernel is now becoming the bottleneck in the forwarding, not even
> on a 3GHz Intel CPU is it possible to forward even 10GE using the normal
> Linux kernel path (my guess right now is that this is due to context
> switching etc, not really CPU performance).
That is a bridge to cross once we reach it, I doubt that we will
realistically reach 10 Gbps home internet access for the masses soon.
>
> Marvell has been the only one to really aim for lots of CPU performance in
> their SoC, there might be others now going the same path but it's also a
> downside if the CPU becomes bogged down with packet forwarding when it's also
> expected to perform other tasks on behalf of the user (and ISP).
As stated above there is an argument to concentrate non core router
functionality to another device (like one of those NAS devices that can also
share a printer)
All that said, I believe that your opinion is far closer to the real world and
positions of the ISPs, so I expect things stay as they are, but I cab dream
can't I ;) ...
Best Regards
Sebastian
>
> --
> Mikael Abrahamsson email: swm...@swm.pp.se
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