On Wed, Mar 27, 2013 at 07:49:27PM +0100, Andre Keller wrote: > Hi > > I'm looking into replacing some older OpenBSD boxes (running BGPD/OSPFD > and do routing, no active pf) with some new hardware. Of course I'd like > to replace them with something fast. > Currently there is only moderate load ~200mbps / 200-300kpps. But a > little room to grow wont hurt. I guess multicore is nice to distribute > the load from the routing processes over multiple cores. The interrupt > load from the nics is handled by one core only, right? > > Ideally I'd have a CPU with fewer cores but higher CPU frequency on each > core? Does anybody have experience with Core i7 CPUs that supposedly can > automatically over-clock single CPU cores? (such as the Intel Core > i7-3770K). Are the AMD FX processors any good for this purpose? Is > cache/memory bandwidth and speed a major concern? > > I did some basic tests with some hardware I have lying around and saw > that a Intel Xeon X3470 performs pretty well. How important is the nic > driver? In the archives I read that the em driver is pretty good. Is > that still the case? Anything else I need to take into consideration? >
Big caches, quick memory and a good IO conectivity helps a lot. AFAIK turbo mode of the new intel CPUs should work but I never tried to figure that out. The clock speed of a CPU can only be compared between the same CPU family. Sometimes a higher clock rate CPU is doing less forwarding than a "slower" CPU. -- :wq Claudio
