Thursday, June 29th 2023
Banana Pi Announces BPI-R4 Open Source Router SBC With WiFi 7 and 5G Capabilities
Banana Pi recently released the specifications of their upcoming BPI-R4 router SBC with a host of new connectivity and features over the last generation BPI-R3. The new BPI-R4 adds dual 10GbE via the SFP ports, with a second board design offering 10GbE+2.5GbE instead, as well as a large daughterboard addon that enables 36 Gbps tri-band WiFi 7 and fits to a pair of mPCIE connectors on the bottom. There is also now support for 5G cellular via a M.2 B-Key port laid over the top of a trio of NanoSIM card slots. Enabling this improvement in connectivity is the updated MediaTek 'Filogic 880' MT7988A SoC which features four Cortex-A73 cores at 1.8 GHz as well as a host of dedicated improvements specifically tuned for high speed networking which combines most functions into the single SoC. Now instead of surrounding the main processor with a host of co-processing chips like the BPI-R3 did, the BPI-R4 simply surrounds the SoC with 8 GB of DDR4 and an 8 GB eMMC flash module. The remaining wireless logic now lives on the NIC daughterboard. The BPI-R4 does give up one of its gigabit RJ-45 ports despite the topside space savings, but reuses this empty space by offering an optional plug-in POE module, and both a 12 V power input as well as 20 V USB-PD with the added Type-C port.
Features retained from previous generations are the M.2 M-Key for SSD storage expansion, a microSD card slot, rear facing USB 3.2 Type-A, the bootstrap toggle switch, and 26-pin GPIO. The BPI-R4 retains roughly the same physical dimensions as the BPI-R3 except for the additional height from the WiFi 7 module which hugs the bottom of the main board when installed. The BPI-R4, like its predecessors, will support Debian Linux and OpenWRT at launch with images available on the Banana Pi wiki product page. Banana Pi hopes to launch the BPI-R4 by Q1 2024 and has yet to announce any pricing. Our hope is that pricing stays roughly in line with the BPI-R3 which launched at just shy of $90 USD. Given the swath of new technologies on the BPI-R4 it's a fair guess that it is going to be over the $100 mark.
Features retained from previous generations are the M.2 M-Key for SSD storage expansion, a microSD card slot, rear facing USB 3.2 Type-A, the bootstrap toggle switch, and 26-pin GPIO. The BPI-R4 retains roughly the same physical dimensions as the BPI-R3 except for the additional height from the WiFi 7 module which hugs the bottom of the main board when installed. The BPI-R4, like its predecessors, will support Debian Linux and OpenWRT at launch with images available on the Banana Pi wiki product page. Banana Pi hopes to launch the BPI-R4 by Q1 2024 and has yet to announce any pricing. Our hope is that pricing stays roughly in line with the BPI-R3 which launched at just shy of $90 USD. Given the swath of new technologies on the BPI-R4 it's a fair guess that it is going to be over the $100 mark.
39 Comments on Banana Pi Announces BPI-R4 Open Source Router SBC With WiFi 7 and 5G Capabilities
Header overhead elimination for large file transfers alone is worth it. Granted, it does nothing for a typical gamer/streaming household.
Can you share some docs on the topic?
10Gb is too much for the time being, we have discussed it last year too with Swede, the SoCs are still MIA and it simply doesn't take off yet. Even the 2.5Gb switches are pretty rare because there are no mainstream solutions, I have read pretty mixed reviews about current solutions. We are waiting for Realtek for years... but something is a miss.
I kinda managed to make 2.5Gb 3 port Switch + stable 2Gb WIFI6 solution under 200€, but the Mediatek chipset is still under development, it will be mature only next year really. Can I recommend BPI solutions for an average Joe? Absolutely no. Is it safe? Mostly yes, code main OpenWRT contributors are Europeans. Is it stable? On most part yes, it does not have any stable OS release yet, only snapshots, some had problems with some pieces, but they work. I have another sister MT7981B device using multi MWAN 5G modem handler, it is more capricious.He's a hardware guy, just the new HW SoCs does not support(or not implemented) it anymore. HW engines just don't do them IMHO, at least those I've had met. Not needed. The only thing you should do is SQM Cake your WAN. Most routers shit their pants using that tho, not these tho, these Mediateks have a lot of horsepower.
According to wiki it's only about 4% more bandwidth in a perfect environment for it, so it's been ignored a lot - the fragmentation issues going off hardware with jumbo frame support to hardware without it, the penalty is far worse
It's trading latency for bandwidth, which is not something home users want
There are pro grade switches that don't store frames before forwarding them, and these switches can do wirespeed jumbos with even LAG and VLAN.
If you want to route jumbo frames however, that is another problem - a conceptual one.
www.vmware.com/content/dam/digitalmarketing/vmware/en/pdf/techpaper/10gige-performance-study.pdfI'm talking about switches starting in the 5-figures range. ;) And that's for small enterprises. Heavy hitters start from a 6-figure a piece. And jumbo frames work just fine then, because you don't just plop any server and NIC there.
Not to mention the usecases with SANs and the rest.
But the main reason even for iSCSI guys... setting jumbo just doesn't improve anything over 1500 as CPU's are enough but the storage backbone actually ain't, you end up on file system + SQL bottleneck actually. People often screw around thing thinking that larger is better but often fail to realize that it doesn't change anything. That's why even Jumbo Frames has always been a questionable thing with very limited usage, it fits only in specially scenarios with CPU being the bottleneck. It especially applies to Enterprise gear or routing to AWS etc.
It is clear to me that you haven't had the pleasure seeing a properly designed and implemented networks with jumbo frames. If you had, you wouldn't be saying the things you are saying.
If you have the need, the hardware and the know-how to set jumbos right, it's a day and night difference in performance.
It doesnt support wifi (always fragmented) so it's a niche tech for very limited scope networks with high end equipment at each end - the situations it's of benefit are pretty limited