CRS520-4XS-16XQ-RM (NEW)

CRS520-4XS-16XQ-RM has started to be listed in distributor announcements.

It will be ready to buy in a few weeks.

What are your thoughts on the product?

I don’t need it but I love it !
Heck, with that kind of CPU inside I could make it my main router instead of CCR2116-12G-4S+.
There is even nice unlisted video of the switch on YouTube.

looks like ccr2004 CPU so you will be doing a CPU downgrade

Yes, I know. But I’m fine with downgrade because I was aiming for ccr2004 at start but post-COVID crisis made it unavailable and I stretched and bought 2116 instead.

crs520 looks like will cost 2795 USD, 3x the 2116 cost, nice strategy…

I saw that too.
Yeah, it’s a shame really. I was hoping to get rid of all non-Mikrotik equipment (Mellanox 40Gbe, Brocade ICX-6610, Zyxel XS3700, etc) but it’s too costly…

EDIT:
CCR2004 has AL32400 quad core CPU @1.7GHz, CCR2116/2216 have 16 core AL73400 but this one has quad core AL52400 @2.0GHz.

Never mind…confused on the product naming…

CCR2004-1G-2XS-PCIe has AL52400 CPU, is the same CPU just at different clock-rate

Amazing pice for a 16x100GE + 4x 25GE switch. Lets just hope it has the buffers for datacenter-work and gets EVPN some day.

Its disappointing that the block diagram is omitted at this point. It’s one of the most useful bits of documentation that allows me to judge pre-purchase what each Mikrotik device is capable of.

In my mind this is much more important for Mikrotik RouterOS products than it is for other manufacturers as RouterOS has pretty much all the same capabilities on every high end device.

I find I can only get a useful idea of the capabilities of a new product by looking at the block diagram ( CPU specs, switchchip specs, CPU interconnect speed etc ), and the supported acceleration features.

I really hope this isn’t an intended trend for the future and its just a temporary omission.

Buffers are very important for Datacenter switching. Hell they are even important for service provider, especially when a switch has a mix of port speeds.

I hope Mikrotik product designers understand this.


And yes, EVPN with both VXLAN and MPLS support (as per RFC) will be amazing on these switches.

buffers topic is very controversial…

as i perceive it traditionally big buffers (several gigabytes) was not a common feature in datacenter and enterprise switching (broadcom tomahawk and trident SOC’s for example), but in service provider networks big buffers were common (broadcom Qumran and Jericho SOC’s in contrast)

however nowadays i feel data center market is steering also towards big buffers because of elefant flows from IA on datacenters

big buffers comes with a significant cost in manufaturing (HBM memory) and respective cost of development for the network operating system to take advantage of them

but i think in actual market for service providers big buffers is a must, if a peasant like me have noted that, i am very sure MikroTik also take note of that, but it will take time, MikroTik forwarding accelerated by ASIC is on its infancy, so we have a long route ahead in which we will see many advances not without some headaches

Good morning,
why isn’t the name CRS522-4XS-16XQ-2XG-RM. In reality it has 22 Ports and the 2x 10G RJ45 are not mentioned at all. I’m getting confused by the naming scheme of Mikrotik.

BR, Michael

Maybe because they are marked as Management and Boot port (of course, you can use them as however you want) ? Same thing on CCR2116-12G-4S+. There is one more LAN port which is marked as Eth/Boot and you can use it as regular LAN port, but it is not included in naming scheme.
There is one discrepancy though, for CRS520-4XS-16XQ-RM:
in specifications on web site it is clearly written that those two ports support 10M/100M/1G/2.5G/5G/10G.
However, in brochure it is written that they support 10M/100M/1G/10G. No mention of 2.5G and 5G.

10G RJ45 for dedicated management is ridiculous.

You don’t need Gigabytes of buffers, A regular Cisco Nexus 9300 has about 40MB i think.

block diagram published.

If 2 10Gigabit Ethernet ports are only for management, why not just 1Gbps?

The current CPU can test 10Gbps, that’s true, but it still seems too much for management only

nice
still waiting for L2, L3 and QoS HW-offload capabilities for this model

Block diagram lists the CPU as the AL32400 (4C- 1.7GHz) the specifications page lists it as the AL52400 (4C - 2.0GHz) is this a typo?

Because SoC provides those two 10Gbps ports (stand-alone, so not fit neither for switching nor for L3HW offloaded routing) …

I agree it’s similar to using USB3.1 to connect a simple keyboard, but if computer doesn’t have any slower USB ports, what else can be done?

this switch still isn’t listed in the L3HW docs page, i’m interested in the size of the TCAM (how many routes can fit in it).