APU3 - pcengines

PaulTech

Weaksauce
Joined
Jan 20, 2004
Messages
83
Hello,

I have not yet seen APU being mentioned on the forums and figured I'd share a link to a product I've found incredibly useful.

http://www.pcengines.ch/apu3c2.htm

It has found uses in our environment as a network control plane for ASICs/FPGA's
Can be had in the ~100 USD range.

Let me know what you think or if you know of other such products!
 
I run an APU2 with pfSense at home for a firewall.

Have seen that's a fairly popular choice for the box.
Talking to owner in hopes of replacing the i211AT ethernet with something a bit more powerful along with more standardized headers.

It's fantastic little box, We use it extensively for the easy to add LTE modems providing lights-out recovery to facilities.
 
I only have a 100Mbit Comcast connection, so it's more than powerful enough to handle that. IIRC, the limit for these things seems to be about ~700Mbit connections.

I think when I built mine it only cost me like $175 total for the board, case, power supply and SSD.
 
Talking to owner in hopes of replacing the i211AT ethernet with something a bit more powerful along with more standardized headers.

What do you mean by this? I have a different box which has four of these and they seem rock solid; also have a few on an AIC in my server and one in my desktop as a second 1GbE.
 
For home usage the I211-AT chipset would have no performance implications (950+mbit port to port has been tested).

However as you increase the forwarding/addresses table size the lookup do not scale due to the interrupt heavy chipset (Very little offload is available, checksuming mostly).
The use of MSI-X helps with this issue as it'll multi-queue interrupts against different cpus but does not compare to a chipset designed with routers in mind (Larger/dynamtic buffer, cut-through switching)
 
Don't know if anybody else has noticed, but PCEngines released an APU4 now with 4xgigabit ports on the Intel i211 chip.
 
Hello,

I have not yet seen APU being mentioned on the forums and figured I'd share a link to a product I've found incredibly useful.

http://www.pcengines.ch/apu3c2.htm

It has found uses in our environment as a network control plane for ASICs/FPGA's
Can be had in the ~100 USD range.

Let me know what you think or if you know of other such products!
Intel NICs and AES me want! Links?
 
Still the same slow AMD APU though. Wish they'd update that...

I'm sure it'll get updated eventually. I am happy with the CPU performance of it still. For a entire board that only uses 8-12W of power it's great.

I need to get off my ass and re-learn how to setup VLAN's because I'm actually considering getting the newer APU2 just to have an extra LAN port.
 
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