Most common design i’v seen for armv7 is a 32kb L1 cache per core and a common L2 cache. Do not know if this is in the armv7 (isa) specification or simply a popular replicated (licensed) reference design.
I do not understand the focus on the comparison of the two arm(v7)cortex A9 cores in the highly specialized piece of silicon in the netgear router (BCM47094) and the intel i7 U4600 without taking the (unnamed) Realtec dual-port NIC into account.
Realtec has a wide product range from bad to good with good to non-existing support in the linux-kernel and everything in between. Some of those in budget-friendly range aren’t the best (speaking mildly here) and tend to cause a lot of bustraffic/noise and ton’s of hw interrupts.
Being applied in an industrial fanless computer the Reatec NIC-chip is likely an PCIe 2.0 device directly hooked-up to one of the PCIe buses of the i7-4600U.
Best case scenario it uses one of the two 4-lane PCIe 2.0 buses giving you a max bus-speed 4 * 500 MB/s; Worst-case: it is a simple (budget-friendly) design using one of the four single-lane PCIe buses.
Al I’m saying is take all the hardware into account before jumping to conclusions.
And if network performance (throughput, bandwidth and latency) is a big deal, you may ask yourself if you are using the right hardware.
Executing a speedtest at regular level, IMO it’s not a good idea since the actual he network usage could change the results.
Latency is usually less affected by this problem, and you can already monitor and graph it using collectd: Statistics (collectd) — NethServer 7 Final
You are probably right for the general population of Nethserver users. What I would really like (and this is way off my simple set of feature requests, which I ordered based on my guess at effort required) is a map of capacity and load for:
The Nethserver gateway (bandwidth, latency from the LAN to WAN connection in the box, and correlated CPU consumption.
The bandwidth and latency from the WAN port on Nethserver to the closest Speedtest server.
My client on the LAN or WLAN to Nethserver LAN port bandwidth and latency (In other words, host a speedtest.net server on Nethserver so I can look at my local network.
The datasheet for the box lists 2xRealtek 8111E GbE NICs. The datasheet for the 8111E says it is 1 lane of PCIe at 2.5Gbps. As you probably know, PCIe 1.0 is 2.5 Gigatransfers per lane (250MB/Sec per lane) so the bus speed would support more than 1Gigabit/sec of Ethernet.
I agree with your points about RealTek (no professional experience) and their drivers, which to generalize to all Linux NIC drivers, performance varies a lot.
@harry realtek adapters are not that bad, but believe me, most are not that good. Due to CPU-to bandwidth ratio, often Broadcom and mostly Intel overcome the results of the Taiwanese ethernet chips. 8111F is PCIe 1.1 compatible, therefore i am not that confident for a sustained 1gbps ethernet load on that adapter. Otherwise, i’m confident that any network traffic will come not cheap CPU load.
Just for the sake of chatting, no disrespect intended
