You might laugh, but for embedded applications where we only need 1-3 hard-wired Ethernet ports, and don't need full GigE, we're actually starting to investigate using....Raspberry Pi 3s . (More and more often now, 802.11n/ac wireless is the primary connection medium for a lot of our client devices, so less need these days for wired Ethernet.)
The RPi3 includes 802.11n, 10/100 ethernet, 4-port USB 2.0 (supporting Eth-to-USB converters), and Bluetooth low-power - all standard. Cost is incredibly cheap - just $35 qty 1, plus some small change for whatever you decide you need for a case and PSU. And their performance is astonishingly high - no firm benchmarks yet that I've seen, but looks like it's going to pen out at ~50% faster than the net6501-70 on single-threaded tasks, and even more on multi-threaded ones (given it has four (!) cores [*] ). At those price/performance numbers, it becomes harder and harder to justify a platinum-priced, zero-support, non-updated-in-umpteen-years platform like Soekris. (One might argue the Soekris is more robustly built - whatever that means in the Real World, given all the failure reports here - but the price of a single net6501-70 will buy over a half-dozen RPi 3s to have around as spares, including extra cases and PSUs. ) We haven't quantified the real power consumption yet, but everything points to the RPi 3 using less, sometimes a LOT less, juice than the net6501. We'll post our experiences as we evaluate and test. >> "I'm disappointed to find that Soekris has been so quite about these problems. If this was a preventable >> heat issue with the CPU, I'm doubly disappointed since I asked about CPU power management when >> I first got the boards. Soekris provided no solution but to run the CPUs at full power when they're very >> capable of running at much lower power with "normal" intel BIOS configurations." Yup. We are pretty well through with Soekris at this point unless there's no other choice, given the hardware reliability (witness this thread), zero communication, and total lack of updates (hardware, bios, and documentation). And that's all before the hugely out-of-whack price/performance/power ratio is considered. We can also get support in a heartbeat from literally thousands of expert users of the platform - quite different. David [[ * See: https://blog.pivotal.io/labs/labs/faster-soekris-net6501-raspberry-pi - a 2013 comparison with between the old RaspPi Model B vs the Soekris 6501-70. Soekris at that time was 1.7x the speed of a RPi model B for a single-threaded task. But the new RPi 3 is 2.5x+ faster than the model B for single-threads and 3x+ faster for multiple-threads, so given those numbers it's reasonable to think it's going to be 50% faster than the net6501-70 in the real world, at a bare minimum.]] On Mon, Mar 28, 2016 at 3:33 AM, Ben Kochie <sup...@gmail.com> wrote: > > We endedup replacing our soekris boards being used as routers with VyOS with Ubiquiti EdgeRouter Lite since we only needed 2 router ports for this install. We used a 1U bracket so we could install 2 of them in 1U, saving a bit of space. > > https://www.rfarmor.com/index.php/toughswitch-mounts/1uurspoe.html > > I'm disappointed to find that Soekris has been so quite about these problems. If this was a preventable heat issue with the CPU, I'm doubly disappointed since I asked about CPU power management when I first got the boards. Soekris provided no solution but to run the CPUs at full power when they're very capable of running at much lower power with "normal" intel BIOS configurations. > > On Fri, Mar 18, 2016 at 8:46 AM, Andreas Steinel <a.stei...@gmail.com> wrote: >> Hi Scott, >> On Mon, Feb 22, 2016 at 3:04 PM, Scott Gustafson < sc...@garlicsoftware.com> wrote: >>> Can anyone on the list share which vendor, model, and OS to which they >>> have switched? >> >> We switched to APU Boards >> http://www.pcengines.ch/apu.htm
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