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    New Alix board for 2013

    Scheduled Pinned Locked Moved Hardware
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    • nesenseN
      nesense
      last edited by

      here's a picture of the board:

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      • W
        watercooled
        last edited by

        Do you have some way to measure power consumption of the board?

        For comparison, I measured the 2D13 at 3W AC idle through a reasonably efficient 12V power supply. Although IIRC it didn't change under load either, my meter doesn't have decimal resolution.

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        • nesenseN
          nesense
          last edited by

          @watercooled:

          Do you have some way to measure power consumption of the board?

          For comparison, I measured the 2D13 at 3W AC idle through a reasonably efficient 12V power supply. Although IIRC it didn't change under load either, my meter doesn't have decimal resolution.

          Document says 6 to 12W depending on CPU load. This is using the T40N CPU with a 9W TDP. plan is to change to T40E with a 6W TDP.

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          • W
            watercooled
            last edited by

            The documentation claims about 5W DC for the existing Geode platform though, and I measured lower than that AC, so I was wondering if measured power could again be lower.

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            • stephenw10S
              stephenw10 Netgate Administrator
              last edited by

              Some of those plug-in power meters claim an amazing accuracy. However if you look at the cost if genuinely accurate power meters it's hard to believe. That's especially true for switching power supplies. It wouldn't surprise me to find they misread by a few Watts at very low power levels.

              Steve

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              • nesenseN
                nesense
                last edited by

                BTW it also states that PoE is not supported and never will for the APU board.

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                • W
                  watercooled
                  last edited by

                  @stephenw10:

                  Some of those plug-in power meters claim an amazing accuracy. However if you look at the cost if genuinely accurate power meters it's hard to believe. That's especially true for switching power supplies. It wouldn't surprise me to find they misread by a few Watts at very low power levels.

                  Steve

                  I've found mine to be reasonably accurate (it's not a cheap one), allowing for rounding without any decimals of course, and it does account for PF for instance. But I will try to get around to measuring DC draw.

                  It's not like consumer meters are £1000 worth of kit either.

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                  • stephenw10S
                    stephenw10 Netgate Administrator
                    last edited by

                    Well exactly. My meter was ~£30 and seems to work OK. It measures Watts and VA so I guess it allows for powerfactor but it's clearly not true RMS so I doubt it reads 'spiky' waveforms too well. I still use it though because it gives me a good idea of what's drawing power and if I reduce that. Just keep in mind that real power meters that have 0.01% accuracy are, as you say, many thousands of £/$.

                    Anyway 6W is low enough for me.  :)

                    Steve

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                    • W
                      watercooled
                      last edited by

                      OK here are some DC measurements from my 2D13 for comparison.

                      Voltage set at 12.0V
                      Idle: 0.28A 3.36W
                      ~60Mb/s download (speedtest): 0.34A 4.08W
                      Max CPU, achieved with

                      dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/null
                      

                      or burnMMX: fluctuating between 0.37 and 0.39A 4.44-4.68W

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                      • stephenw10S
                        stephenw10 Netgate Administrator
                        last edited by

                        Nice.  :)
                        I'm certainly prepared to believe those measurements, assuming the psu holds 12V well enough.  ;)

                        How many Watts do you think are lost in the PSU, it's efficiency?
                        Given the small variation in power, 5W max, perhaps the supplied psu is still highly efficient at 3.36W.
                        Pure speculation time: I would expect to see perhaps 0.25-0.5W loss in the PSU in which case I would hope an AC side power meter should read 4W (if it doesn't display fractions of a Watt).

                        User phil.davis could tell us a lot about the power consumption of the old Alix board since a lot of his sites are solar powered.

                        Steve

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                        • W
                          watercooled
                          last edited by

                          Yeah I was using a bench power supply and double-checked voltage and current with a couple of multimeters.

                          The PSU I normally use, and did the AC measurements with, is a 60W FSP one which I also use to supply some other network kit (I've also measured with some 12W PSUs with the same results IIRC). It's efficiency level V so >87% average efficiency, although the points for that average are measured at 25, 50, 75 and 100 percent load, so it may not be that efficient at <10% load.

                          Either way, you're likely correct the AC meter should be displaying 4W. The resolution isn't ideal for measuring this low TBF, but it's ballpark accurate at least. Even being less than half a Watt out and clipping the decimals rather than rounding up could explain why it displays 3.

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                          • nesenseN
                            nesense
                            last edited by

                            I ran iperf again, this time using two computers connected to the board on individual port, all running 1000baseT, iperf server on a windows 8.1 box, and client on macbook laptop running os x 10.7.5, only running squid on pfsense 2.1, here are the results:

                            –----------------------------------------------------------
                            Server listening on TCP port 5001
                            TCP window size: 64.0 KByte (default)

                            [  4] local 192.168.10.11 port 5001 connected with 192.168.20.11 port 49272
                            [  4]  0.0-10.0 sec  539 MBytes  452 Mbits/sec

                            Using netio:

                            NETIO - Network Throughput Benchmark, Version 1.32
                            (C) 1997-2012 Kai Uwe Rommel

                            UDP server listening.
                            TCP server listening.
                            UDP connection established …
                            Receiving from client, packet size  1k ...  21.98 MByte/s
                            Sending to client, packet size  1k ...  184.75 MByte/s
                            Receiving from client, packet size  2k ...  4.16 MByte/s
                            Sending to client, packet size  2k ...  263.60 MByte/s
                            Receiving from client, packet size  4k ...  0 Byte/s
                            Sending to client, packet size  4k ...  428.63 MByte/s
                            Receiving from client, packet size  8k ...  403.75 KByte/s
                            Sending to client, packet size  8k ...  567.76 MByte/s
                            Receiving from client, packet size 16k ...  203.54 KByte/s
                            Sending to client, packet size 16k ...  746.44 MByte/s
                            Receiving from client, packet size 32k ...  0 Byte/s
                            Sending to client, packet size 32k ...  913.70 MByte/s
                            Done.

                            TCP connection established …
                            Receiving from client, packet size  1k ...  28.91 MByte/s
                            Sending to client, packet size  1k ...  30.98 MByte/s
                            Receiving from client, packet size  2k ...  23.72 MByte/s
                            Sending to client, packet size  2k ...  23.23 MByte/s
                            Receiving from client, packet size  4k ...  33.43 MByte/s
                            Sending to client, packet size  4k ...  43.70 MByte/s
                            Receiving from client, packet size  8k ...  23.25 MByte/s
                            Sending to client, packet size  8k ...  46.61 MByte/s
                            Receiving from client, packet size 16k ...  31.16 MByte/s
                            Sending to client, packet size 16k ...  47.44 MByte/s
                            Receiving from client, packet size 32k ...  14.18 MByte/s
                            Sending to client, packet size 32k ...  47.83 MByte/s
                            Done.

                            Looks like I need something other than the crappy Macbook to test with  :-\

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                            • stephenw10S
                              stephenw10 Netgate Administrator
                              last edited by

                              Nice!  :)
                              If you run 'top -SH' on the apu board what does the cpu usage look like during that test?

                              Not sure how netio is measuring that udp speed but most of those numbers are far higher than you could get down a gigabit connection so it looks like it's buffering somewhere.

                              Steve

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                              • W
                                watercooled
                                last edited by

                                It's the UDP transmit speed, but of course most of that won't make it on to the wire, so it's essentially irrelevant. The receive speeds are what you'd want to look at, but it seems something is up with the testing as they're zero, or close to it, on most of the runs.

                                Edit: I've just tried the UDP benchmark myself and it never reported above roughly 113MB/s, so it seems it works a bit differently than I thought, and something's up with the above benchmark.

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                                • C
                                  Criggie
                                  last edited by

                                  FYI I've just finished doing iperf testing on an older alix 2d2.
                                  Sadly I did not take power usage measurements while testing.

                                  Full results at: http://forum.pfsense.org/index.php/topic,70911.0.html

                                  Short version, okay for up to 50 Mbit, can do up to 95 Mbit but you're wringing the nuts off there.

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                                  • ?
                                    Guest
                                    last edited by

                                    @stephenw10:

                                    How are you testing that? A throughput test is what's needed, iperf running on two separate machine not on the pfSense box.
                                    326Mbps seems disappointingly slow.  :-\

                                    Steve

                                    We ran a throughput test on a very similar box (same cpu, same NICs), and were disappointed.

                                    Our APU only recently arrived.

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                                    • A
                                      Applied
                                      last edited by

                                      First impressions (running IPFire):

                                      http://www.tuxone.ch/2013/12/alix-nachfolger-im-test.html

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                                      • X
                                        xbipin
                                        last edited by

                                        i heard this new alix apu gets pretty hot, almost 81.5 degrees

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                                        • stephenw10S
                                          stephenw10 Netgate Administrator
                                          last edited by

                                          Since it relies on the enclosure for cooling, what case was that in?

                                          Steve

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                                          • X
                                            xbipin
                                            last edited by

                                            in the default case it heats up that much, atleast thats what the developer told me himself and that it might be fixed in the next redesign so consider that temperature it would make it useless in hot countries like mine where the summer goes upto 50 degrees

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