I’ve had a chance to hook these thing up to some really fast connections, and after gathering enough throughput data I have a theory on how the mikrotik works. It’s important to me as I’m trying to build the highest throughput network possible, and I have a lot of 1200s out there, moving to the 1100s with build out.
It seems to me that the port 9 and 10 flaw on the RB1100 is quite interesting as it surpasses the binary number 0x7 (8). I’ve noticed the real world capabilities of the 1200 to hover just north of 125mb, and the 1100 just north of 250mb (binary 0x3, or 4). It makes me wonder if the ports are multiplexed (IE not true ports, but 4 ports that share a single one via benefit of high speed shift registers or what not). With the RB1200, it’s likely that it has 2 true ports multiplexed 4 ways to make 8, and 2 bastard ports (9 and 10) to hide the fact. With the RB1100, it’s likely to mimick this with 8 real ports, multiplexed 2 ways (other than 3 of them), which explains the orientation of the ports and their capabilities (in theory, I have one on the way to test).
The future for mikrotik as it would seem, is to give each port a processing unit, and then a backbone bus between the port’s processing units, using the “master” port to regulate backbone communications.
How far off base am I here?