I just recently got a new ISP and new internet speed 1200/600, my current firewall with opnsense can not handle the speed (AMD GX-412TC SOC), I have been looking for a new firewall (opnsense + 2.5 Ethernet) and found several with the Intel N100 CPU (2023).
I was wondering if this CPU is good enough to handle the Internet speed and if there is overhead?
The problem is Opnsense, as the BSD kernel used is doing single thread network routing. So the APU can saturate 1gbit with multiple connections/threads or if you switch to a firewall with a Linux kernel like OpenWRT.
That said, a N100 probably does have enough single thread performance to do 1.2 Gbit. Not sure about the full 2.5gbit though.
Thank you for the answers. I enjoy opnsense, it's easier to use then openwrt for me personally.
I was thinking to do some testing of the new device before I replace the old one. But I wanted to hear if anyone has experiences.
I looked at CPU benchmark net, and saw that N100 is about 8 times faster then the AMD SOC. I'm not sure if this is linear with performance increase.
Currently max download is about 600-700 while upload is 300-400.
How are you measuring your speeds? I think cloudflare speed tests were more accurate for me then ookla, but in the end downloading a large file over usenet gives me the best picture
Edit- and that made me realise my ssd was a bottleneck, replacing that helped me go from 500-600 to about 900-950 on my gigabit connection