Linksys EA8500 Max-Stream AC2600 MU-MIMO Smart Wi-Fi Router Reviewed

[sfx2000]

Krait/scorpion isnt faster than A15 but does have better power usage. They still havent introduced 64 bit kraits yet.

And they won't - Krait is a specific implementation...

For the moment, they're using ARM IP blocks to get a product out the door for 64bit handsets, but I'll bet they're working on their own implementation...

 

[System Error Message]

the power use isnt doubled between 64 bit and 32 bit but what im saying is for the same fabrication technologies 64 bit CPUs use up more space and power. I understand that the benefits for 64 bit are worth it but in routing it doesnt help.

It would be interesting to see a 64 bit krait, i hope they will come out with dual quad core or 8 core kraits.

For example for the router i use does use a 64 bit CPU but that doesnt have anything to do with routing, its because it has so many cores, a mesh grid and large RAM capacity that having 64 bits help. It uses hardware acceleration for different encryption tasks and math (not implemented by OS) though which is what makes it very fast at VPN. Despite being 64 bit each core is slower than a 32 bit PPC core. it is very unlikely that such routers are used at home.

 

[Vampire Dog]

I looked at the reviews of this router on Amazon, and they are mostly positive. However, I noticed that 34 of the 51 reviews were "Vine" reviews of a free product. Also these Vine reviews have a average rating of 4.6. I find this highly suspicious, that this is so highly rated by people who have received this item for free. Looking at other routers on Amazon, I saw a pattern of a lot of Linksys routers in general having Vine reviews. It seems that Linksys is giving out a lot of free routers for review.

The reviews for this router: http://www.amazon.com/Linksys-Dual-...l_reviews&filterByStar=all_stars&pageNumber=2 were particularly interesting because 49 of the 50 reviews were vine reviews. I looked randomly at Asus and Netgear routers on Amazon, but did not see any vine reviews of their routers.

The problem I have with these Vine reviews is that many of these people are not qualified to review a toaster. One reviewer even thought she was reviewing a modem, and was talking about saving money by not having to rent a modem from her ISP. Even scarier, someone else on Amazon found her review "helpful".

 

[thiggins]

It's a big world out there, with lots of people with varying levels of expertise.

Any company can participate in the Vine program. At least Amazon identifies the reviews as such. There are lots of sneakier ways to get positive reviews.

But, yes, that certainly is a lot of free routers!

 

[sfx2000]

It would be interesting to see a 64 bit krait, i hope they will come out with dual quad core or 8 core kraits.

I'm sure they are... most of the Architecture licensees either have released (Apple Cyclone, e.g. A8) or will release their own versions based on ARMv8 - and there's a number of players in the server market as well, but that's a vertical space... Cyclone has been pretty impressive in both dual-core and tri-core (A8x) implementations, and I think Qualcomm's version should be equally awesome - the pace of development in the mobile space has been impressive to say the least...

The CPU in the Linksys EA8500 is a beneficiary of the progress there. Krait and Scorpion are pretty awesome cores, and so is Marvell's Sheeva...

For example for the router i use does use a 64 bit CPU but that doesnt have anything to do with routing, its because it has so many cores, a mesh grid and large RAM capacity that having 64 bits help. It uses hardware acceleration for different encryption tasks and math (not implemented by OS) though which is what makes it very fast at VPN. Despite being 64 bit each core is slower than a 32 bit PPC core. it is very unlikely that such routers are used at home.

You're talking about Tilera on Microtik right? Not sure what their ISA is, but I think it's their own... it's a pretty powerful chip. I just wonder there how much all the cores there are actually put to use...

Compared to where we are with current General Purpose CPU's - x86 and ARM together - Massive multicore is a very different approach - and perhaps in the longer term, could be better, could be a dead end... Intel has their ex-Larrabee on x86 (Xeon Phi), and Calxeda with their ARM based implementation, just as a couple of examples...

Challenge here is writing code that is massively parallel - and that is easier said than done - it's really a challenge, and one that the GPCPU folks are working thru as well. Look at AMD with their Fusion APU approach - fundamentally it's a step forward, but the ARM guys are killing them on the low end, and Intel is hammering them on the high-end, but I still think AMD is doing the right thing in the long term...

Developers had serious issues working with IBM's Cell processor - it's that hard, but when done right, the results can be pretty awesome... and we all know how long that's been - Cell is the CPU for the Sony PS3, and it's pretty cool...

FWIW - This is probably all stuff for a CS major to mull upon - I'm an Analog RF EE by schoolhouse, and a software guy in practice - recovering systems/standards engineer, and these days, I do Product Dev (e.g. I write requirements after drawing things on a whiteboard, lol).

 

[sfx2000]

It's a big world out there, with lots of people with varying levels of expertise.

Any company can participate in the Vine program. At least Amazon identifies the reviews as such. There are lots of sneakier ways to get positive reviews.

But, yes, that certainly is a lot of free routers!

I think it's good overall - there's a lot of folks deep in the wires, but generally a good product in the market is recognized...

Sometimes - a free review sample will prime the pump and vendors try to find the "thought leaders" and leverage into that.. pretty small price to pay for them..

 

[System Error Message]

The tilera tileGX is their own and unlike ARM they dont license the architecture however even facebook uses their PCIe cards to compliment their servers by performing firewall, networking and webserver. The ones facebook uses are more general purpose and have up to 100 cores while the ones in mikrotik CCRs are newer but a tuned towards networking and have a maximum of 72 cores per CPU. Networking can be massively parallel which is what switches are. Switches use massively parallel chips but arent easy to code for. Tilera CPUs are actually general purpose but with more logic performance than math which would be the opposite of a GPU. Tilera's boasting of automatic multi threading probably comes from the compiler mostly.

On Tilera's website they do sell routers too but without the firmware however the most they have is 244 cores in a single rack unit. The mikrotik CCR1036 can do NAT at wirespeed and route even faster (see their benchmarks on the product page) so they are incredibly fast and mine uses a max of 60W. Nat requires 2 firewall rules in mikrotik routerOS so take a look at routing performance with 5 or 10 rules. Im using the CCR1036-8g-2s+ which has a total of 56G port capacity. I find it quite funny having a router that does wirespeed NAT at a fraction of price/performance compared to even the highest end consumer routers or cisco RV which cant even do NAT at wirespeed not to mention a much better OS. You will also find the price/performance better than tp-link with hardware acceleration

With every CPU design having a compiler its easy to code for different CPUs, the difficulty comes from optimising it to run better on different CPUs and OS. On special purpose or smaller CPUs bad coding becomes much more apparent. From my experience in coding massively parallel code is impressively fast on x86, because all other components such as hard drives, NICs and such all have their own CPUs that perform well when they arent tied to other tasks. The architecture of the computer itself have components that work asynchronously of each other but i see almost every game or program still doing things with dependence and in series.

 

[chadster766]

The tilera tileGX is their own and unlike ARM they dont license the architecture however even facebook uses their PCIe cards to compliment their servers by performing firewall, networking and webserver. The ones facebook uses are more general purpose and have up to 100 cores while the ones in mikrotik CCRs are newer but a tuned towards networking and have a maximum of 72 cores per CPU. Networking can be massively parallel which is what switches are. Switches use massively parallel chips but arent easy to code for. Tilera CPUs are actually general purpose but with more logic performance than math which would be the opposite of a GPU. Tilera's boasting of automatic multi threading probably comes from the compiler mostly.

On Tilera's website they do sell routers too but without the firmware however the most they have is 244 cores in a single rack unit. The mikrotik CCR1036 can do NAT at wirespeed and route even faster (see their benchmarks on the product page) so they are incredibly fast and mine uses a max of 60W. Nat requires 2 firewall rules in mikrotik routerOS so take a look at routing performance with 5 or 10 rules. Im using the CCR1036-8g-2s+ which has a total of 56G port capacity. I find it quite funny having a router that does wirespeed NAT at a fraction of price/performance compared to even the highest end consumer routers or cisco RV which cant even do NAT at wirespeed not to mention a much better OS. You will also find the price/performance better than tp-link with hardware acceleration

With every CPU design having a compiler its easy to code for different CPUs, the difficulty comes from optimising it to run better on different CPUs and OS. On special purpose or smaller CPUs bad coding becomes much more apparent. From my experience in coding massively parallel code is impressively fast on x86, because all other components such as hard drives, NICs and such all have their own CPUs that perform well when they arent tied to other tasks. The architecture of the computer itself have components that work asynchronously of each other but i see almost every game or program still doing things with dependence and in series.

What is the cost for this multicore hardware? It sound awesome but also very expensive.

 

[System Error Message]

If you're talking about the tilera TileGX the cheapest i know is sold by mikrotik but if you purchase it from Tilera than it would be more expensive however their PCIe cards may be cheaper than or equal to intel multi 10Gb network cards for the same amount of 10Gb ports.

The mikrotik CCR router i bought costs $1000 which has 36 cores and 2 SFP+ but you can get the passively cooled 9 core CCR with POE input option for $400 which will do more NAT than the highest end consumer router for those that hate noise and the bulkiness of rackmount hardware. They also come with touchscreens, usb, SFP, SFP+ that can display realtime traffic graphs and other things aside from configuring it. If you use fibre optics or cable you can use SFP instead of a modem. RouterOS also comes with RADIUS server if you want to utilise some security and dont want to use hotspot which is particularly useful since consumer wifi routers can work with that. Considering that each TileGX core does more routing than a single ARM core at the same frequency the CCR1009 has a better price/performance than the ARM based routers in both NAT and VPN but im not sure if the CCR1009 can compete with cheap tp-links with hardware acceleration in price/performance although the configurable firewall makes up for the value.

If you purchase a tileGX platform from tilera they do not come with firmware so you will have to compile your own linux OS as facebook did for theirs using tilera's compiler and instructions. If you use the PCIe cards you can create your own drivers for bypassing the network layer from host OS and have all the work done on the cards and even run the apache web server and firewall too on the same card. Technically you can install another OS on mikrotik routerboards but the only guide for this is on openwrt wiki relating to the RB450G.

If you decide to look at routerboards you may not want to read the forum relating to their performance because many of their customers run so many rules and such which made many here think that mikrotik routerboards are slow. Some edge ISPs use the CCR1036 with thousands of QoS and firewall rules for their users which they generate automatically using scripts.

 

[chadster766]

Those costs aren't bad at all from an enterprise stand point. For enterprise I've stuck with Cisco IOS and found it hard to beat but their routers in this price range aren't even close hardware wise. Maybe I'm not up on the newest Cisco router's in the $1000 - $1500 range.

 

[System Error Message]

If you need Cisco features at the highest speeds than there is no other choice than to go with cisco even though mikrotik routerOS have cisco features they do not perform as well compared to cisco IOS. It also doesnt help that cisco doesnt share their technology properly or charge such a high price for licensing their networking protocols.

If you dont need cisco features at the fastest speeds than mikrotik is a better choice. Thats not to say that pfsense would be nicer to use with multi core, multi CPU xeons but theres also the cost of the NICs and electricity.

I use the CCR1036 at home.

 

[chadster766]

I would really be interested in getting a couple of wcap traces of this device to dig thru the packets...

I used Wireshark for pcaps but what would you recommend for wcaps?

 

[sfx2000]

I used Wireshark for pcaps but what would you recommend for wcaps?

Depends on your config... I typically use linux and capture the raw 802.11 packets there.

Check below - might be helpful, depends on the drivers and other items..

https://wiki.wireshark.org/CaptureSetup/WLAN

 

[chadster766]

T

Depends on your config... I typically use linux and capture the raw 802.11 packets there.

Check below - might be helpful, depends on the drivers and other items..

https://wiki.wireshark.org/CaptureSetup/WLAN

Thanks I will look into this.

 

[sfx2000]

If you need Cisco features at the highest speeds than there is no other choice than to go with cisco even though mikrotik routerOS have cisco features they do not perform as well compared to cisco IOS. It also doesnt help that cisco doesnt share their technology properly or charge such a high price for licensing their networking protocols.

If you dont need cisco features at the fastest speeds than mikrotik is a better choice.

I think that's addressing two different markets - the Linksys EA8500 is a soho Router/AP targeted perhaps towards the high end consumer market. It's a plug-and-play performance solution.

The MicroTik boards, along with RouterOS - A very powerful platform... and targeted towards a very different audience - e.g. Network Pro's and developers... and to enthusiasts that like to tweak things to the nTH degree.

 

[chadster766]

FYI: It has been confirmed that only "Mixed Mode" and "Auto" Channel Width enabled 80Mhz on the WRT1900AC and EA8500.

I was mistaken the "a/n Only" enabled 80Mhz

 

[faur]

Linksys is not CISCO anymore...it's Belkin...so...

Sent from my SM-G900F using Tapatalk

 

[sfx2000]

Linksys is not CISCO anymore...it's Belkin...so...

Sent from my SM-G900F using Tapatalk

Belkin pretty much lets Linksys run their own business...

 

[dfran1]

I got fed up with the 87 and purchased this router yesterday, so far all I can say is that I am selling my rt-ac87r, mailing it out tomorrow.
My thoughts and review to come after I have time with this.

 

[chadster766]

I got fed up with the 87 and purchased this router yesterday, so far all I can say is that I am selling my rt-ac87r, mailing it out tomorrow.
My thoughts and review to come after I have time with this.

I look forward to your results