A multicore implementation of CAKE named cake_mq landed in Linux 7.0. This is important because CAKE is very CPU-intensive, and to this day cannot scale on multiple cores on RouterOS devices. This is why we see product copywriting like this on some Mikrotik products :
But with 16 cores running at 2 GHz, this CCR eats the other one for breakfast. For example, we see at least a 15% increase in single-core performance. And that is the most important aspect when it comes to heavy operations based on per-connection processing. Like queues, for example. CCR2116-12G-4S+ sets a new standard of single-core performance in the whole CCR product family! [source, emphasis mine]
OpenWRT has shippedcake_mqin 25.12 but users reported issues, and current releases come with a known issue footnote mentioning "throughput may be unexpectedly low on some configurations". Sadly, it does not seem ready for real world exposure just yet. I'm not sure if it's a OpenWRT issue, or a Linux cake_mq issue. As of this writing, there was no further work merged in-tree since January 2026.
I'm really looking forward to multicore CAKE finding its way into RouterOS and opening this thread to discuss ongoing developments.
