My eyes Swede... such a blurry pic... I took the math because it is an old router. There are even illegal and old 5W devices. But this is an Asus...
I kinda tried to accent the point of BOM cost and the target and why lower cost devices may have been used, thus causing these problems, and yes exactly because it is china. A really good PMU design may have need for 6 layer PCB design, thus making things more expensive. 4 are the main budget target(for example nowadays we only get 10 layer motherboards in ITX designs, no wonder they OC memory better often). I also agree that theory doesn't match experience... you have to stick in the lab for years and design and torture devices to understand what's what. School doesn't give that to you... simply it would be too expensive and time consuming... like learning for a surgeon... you finish the school and you are OLD, you spent your youth slicing dead people in the morgue.
I agree to the point you can have other great part suppliers, but from engineering stand point during dev phase, Murata provides a good datasheet, and that's gold. Then you can play around, you have values and can simulate things, then understand what's what. You can have the same IC and make two different boards for it, due to design they will operate like day and night in terms of noise, stability and performance. Coils like those rarely suffer from problems at such low currents, in GPU yea... there are dozens of A. It looks like a QC design, so obviously you have a PMU and drive Skyworks radio IC's and it is WAAAY more expensive than that ASUS Broadcomm you really cannot compare them... it like a Bentley vs Jaguar... (the latter one must be understood worse). I hope by inductors you din't mean those small, but higher inductivity ones for noise filtering before the VREGS thus we are talking about different things. ASUS design didn't even have those... and that's a basic design thing having a good power supply.
There actually are universal PMU's... for example like Raspberry Pi 3 has. Four output MxL7704... I have a funny story about it... I ordered a free sample for it... Mouser sent me a wrong order... complained, I am not a thief... and they did nothing about it... well... I kinda didn't argue sending me a roll of few thousand capacitors worth of few hundred bucks... but yea... ordered another free sample after making a complaint xD.
Btw I use kinda a shit old router... Linksys EA6300... I am lucky with the fact, they had to rebadge EA6400 and sell it as EA6300 for some reasons. It is AC1600 and they didn't cripple it slower, and in real life I just did a speedtest in my phone and it shows stable ~400Mbps upload and download... I am kinda happy with that... There is merlin and WRT for it... but it works like crap... the wifi performance is way slower, yes that sucks, I would like to have WRT... well this will kick the bucket... it is like 7!!! years old.
I am not grasping the info as read on the internet but as insider info. There are rebadged ex atheros devices like used in cheap TPLINK made around 2010, and they are still fine... and that's what they will sell you, but not the bleeding edge ones. And... currently we are waiting for native pcie4 SoC anyways... to have few channels per device to be cost reasonable for mortal consumers, like you and I are wanting at least 2.5G-5G switches at home..
And Swede for the sake of conspiracy want something funny...? a Huawei E589u-12 it has WCN1314 that's a Qualcomm or who knows pre Atheros acquisition design... Older chummy days... so they kinda shared information... ah so lax...
NOTE: This is the same as the Vodafone R210. Someone handed me a Huawei E589u-12 Mobile 4G LTE WiFi Router, so I thought I'd have a look at the firmware. However, I was not able to find any firmware for this device, so I started looking...
forum.xda-developers.com
It's not that old and even so... 5GHz PA/LNA's are power hungry and produce a lot more heat than you'd think.
Asus is Taiwanese. Yes, they produce some things in China, but at least their products are designed in Taiwan.
I think they cut far few corners than their competitors, especially D-Link and even more so TP-Link and even cheaper brands like Totolink and Tenda (btw, what is it with all these "link" company names?).
Asus has a pretty good reputation in the router market, but they've had a few duds as well. These days they seem to churn out a lot of cheap (cost, components and made) products that they don't seem to support, which is surprising after the FCC slapped them on the fingers a few years ago. Maybe the FCC agreement to provide software upgrades have ended?
A PMU doesn't require more than a four layer PCB, why should it? You can't compare super compact phone PCB's with something like a router where you have ample space to place the components and don't need more than four layer PCBs.
I mean, if you can make a PC motherboard using a four layer PCB, why should a router need more?
Sure, more layers CAN be good, but it's not always better to have more layers, as it just makes a product more complex. In PC motherboards, a lot of the layers are also just extra shielding.
When I worked at Securifi, they hired some guy in his 50's that was supposed to be a really experienced engineer. He was given a task that took him months and he just kept coming up with excuses why he hadn't found the problem and suggested it could be this, that or something else at every meeting about it. In the end he was fired, as he couldn't solve the problem and one of the other engineers figured it out in the end. It was something fairly simple, but it only happened sometimes, so it actually required some out of the box thinking to solve, which clearly the older engineer didn't have.
Datasheets are nice and all, but what I've learnt over the years is that sometimes datasheets are wrong and sometimes the reference designs are wrong and sometimes the hardware if flawed, so no matter, they don't help you solve the problem. This is why companies with local FAE engineers (good ones at least) often end up getting business as the device makers know they can get local support when there are problems.
That router was not a QCA design, at least not as far as the main SoC went, it was something entirely different. If you do some digging you can find out what it was, if you care. The Wi-Fi was indeed from QCA (with Skyworks PA/LNAs) and so was the switch.
Inductors are coils/chokes... Not sure what you're talking about. The Asus has at least four of them from what I can see.
en.wikipedia.org
A lot of routers are like that, one PCB, multiple products with either a removed front-end or some other tweak, such as less RAM or something stupid. I guess that's how you make multiple SKUs on the cheap.
I think you mean OpenWRT and DD-WRT for it? Merlin is exclusive for Asus routers.
QCA still sells older chips and they just simply didn't bother making a new silkscreen for those old chips, big deal. A lot of companies do that.
And older hardware doesn't always mean it's bad hardware, it just means it's no longer cutting edge. For a lot of industrial stuff, these companies need to provide the same parts for up to a decade. I guess they sell some of the spares or the ones that don't meet certain temperature requirements as general usage parts on the cheap.
Not sure routers needs PCIe 4.0 SoCs yet, most only have PCIe 2.0 to date, as it's fast enough. However, as we're moving beyond 2.5Gbps, unless it's built into the SoC, we might need something faster. Most router SoCs have RGMII or something similar for the Ethernet not PCIe. PCIe is often only used for the Wi-Fi, or in some cases for additional features such as SATA or USB 3.x.
I already have a basic 10Gbps switch at home, so I'm not waiting. Only two ports, but I only have two 10Gbps devices so far, so not really a problem.
I had the R7800, great hardware, but useless firmware, buggy as hell, had to use 1 old version just to get DLNA to work on some devices
Edit: RT-AC86U and R7800 side by side they performed almost the same, what i didnt like was netgear UI, its fugly and a mess OTOH Asus is more user friendly
They've released a lot of firmwares for it. I have had exactly zero issues with mine, but I wasn't an early adopter of it either. By far the best router I've ever owned. Even better with Voxel's firmware for it.
I do agree on the UI though, Netgear is way behind Asus there. Asus has done some really good work on their UI, IF you're a techy user. For the average consumer, both are a mess.
