Any plans on supporting Intel XScale platform? It’s getting more and more popular, and other OSes already support it (however nothing as advanced as MikroTik so far, I believe).
As a customer buying quite large number of licenses, don’t I deserve any word on this?
Possible answers, to make it easier for you:
- No.
- Yes.
- Maybe.
- Never!
- We will come up with some overpriced proprietary XScale-based boards and will support only them, and nothing other XScale based.
- It’s classified.
If you don’t want your answer to be public, I read my e-mail.
Seach the forums…
Why don’t you take the lead and search them first yourself?
Because (suprise!) I already did. Long time ago, yesterday, and now again just to be sure.
Only (relevant) result is:
http://forum.mikrotik.com/t/intel-xscale-processor/1576/1
Very on-topic thread;
- Does it support XScale?
- No, but it does support RB500. Why don’t you trash the boards you have, and buy new ones, this will be so smart and economic of you!
Ofcourse, you possibly could have found something I didn’t - if that is the case, then by all means please show me the right way. I searched the forums for ‘xscale’, because that’s what Intel called it.
But in case your search capabilities are as good (or bad) as mine, I again request an answer from Mikrotik staff, please. Is this planned, or is it even being looked into? For the reasons I won’t go into, we will need to use such boards soon, and we can’t use RB500, or RBAnythingElse. I know that it’s not very difficult to port linux x86 code to XScale, and that Atheros drivers are portable to XScale too, therefore it’s more matter of you guys seeing the point of doing it, rather than overcoming difficulties of such action.
wow, dude, relax…
This forum is made so MT users can exchange their own expiriences, so MT staff can answer your post, but again they don’t have to.
And give them a break, they are all busy becasue of MUM.
No hard feelings?
I asked nicely and politely, which led to me being ignored. You’ve got a point there, and I always could’ve written an e-mail and ask the question directly - on the other hand, I believed others may be interested too, and possibly search for the answer on forums, like i’ve been pointed to do (too bad pointing person didn’t do it him/herself).
I was relaxed for over a month, which was a bad thing to do apparently, because I need to make decisions now, and I don’t know what they should be. As stated in my first post, there are solutions for XScale available, but nothing is as far suiting my needs as mikrotik. There is no doubt that this platform will gain more and more notice and recognition in the future, and Mikrotik support for it in some way is probably merely a question of time; that’s why I would like to know if some timeframe can already be foreseen.
Regarding your “they don’t have to answer” - no answer is also an answer, but for now please let me believe that the lack of answer so far is just simple oversight of this thread; I understand Mikrotik became quite impressively large, but I was taught that you don’t ignore your money and every dollar is worth picking up. Just to be sure, I will be e-mailing link to this thread to official support address, as an official support request, with hope I won’t have to wait for a month to get some kind of response. With responder’s permission, I will add the answer here, if received in form of e-mail and not in this thread - so everyone else interested in this won’t have to waste Mikrotik’s valuable time.
I’m travelling to MUM today and I’ll ask them personally.
I’ll post answer here.
Cheers…
Thank you very much for that - much appreciated!
I was told by MT the answer was “yes” and “be at MUM for the announcement”.
Sadly it clashed with a trip I had to do instead … 
Regards
CableFree Solutions
Ok, lets wait for djape’s after-mum post then 
I asked Mt at the MUM they told me NO, not yet.
maybe in 2.10 but they would be concentrating first on fixing some bugs, and get the ne routerboards running.
BUT they should the new routerboards 100 series…
with one ethernet interface and only only one wifi, the are actualy a lower version of the routerboard 500, but at a sugested price of only 100 dollar…
these boards will sell big…
ps … the MUM was super
Ok, so we’ve got 1 vote for yes, and one vote for no;
conclusion being?
Vote: Maybe …
I believe you’re refering to the RB511 board…
If there’s enough demand for the Xscale platform I’m sure they’d be willing to port to it.. I haven’t really looked into this platform, what would the advantages/disadvantages be?
Or maybe a better question, what does it have that the current Routerboard lacks?
they called it the rb112
IMHO, Xscale = performance at a great price.
I tested a non-RouterOS software platform on a 533MHz Xscale board, and achieved 97Mbps throughput P2P through atheros wireless interfaces in 5GHz Turbo mode with MT bandwidth-test boxes either end (that’s how we bench-test MT wireless routers).
Apparently that was using compression on the wireless interface so the “real throughput” may have been a bit lower - but it was still very impressive throughput.
We find RouterOS needs a 1GHz x86 platform to do that, and making ones run fanless outdoors is sadly not cheap.
Sure the MT guys need to prioritise getting everything working on the current platform; and agreed, a low cost CPE router for $100 would please lots of people.
However, I think there’s considerable need at the high end, so my vote is “yes please” for Xscale.
Regards
CableFree Solutions
Oh, by vote I meant a ‘joke’ about conflicting information as in “yes, it will be supported, be at mum for announcement”, “I asked Mt at the MUM they told me NO, not yet”, and support’s “there are no plans”.
Apparently I will have to use something else for the time being, pray that it works right, and wait until Mikrotik chooses to say “there are plans”
Thanks for your help on this one guys.
Best regards.
Ofca dude, unfortunatelly answer is no.
I just came back from MUM.
Cheers…
Ok, thanks everyone for clearing up that for me.
At MUM, I noticed MT reps talked about 400 RB version, which should be smaller to fit in outdoor cases better and should sport Gbit ethernets. Dunno any times-frames.
But - what about VIA mini-itx? We used some boards for kiosk systems, they were unstable if not supported by good RAM modules, but now it works flawlessly. And it was two years ago. Now they do have nano-itx (12x12cm), I believe you can get fanless version, it runs in 1GHz and is typical x86 platform.
I am personally going to give mini-itx and nano-itx a try once again in a few months.
Cheers,
-pekr-