This provides up to 4 x 2.5 Gb/s Ethernet ports, plus WiFi.
The passively-cooled metal box has 2 x 2.5 Gb/s Ethernet ports, but you can add another 2 ports with Ethernet USB dongles. It has a slow quadruple 2 GHz Cortex-A55 CPU, but this is still very fast in comparison with the older Raspberry Pi models and its Ethernet and USB ports are much better than those of any Raspberry Pi, allowing full speed.
The schematic of this firewall/router is public, which is good. Also, unlike for Intel or AMD CPUs, much more public documentation about the CPU is available, which makes it more trustworthy.
The RK3568 CPU has good Linux support, but even so, an ARM-based computer can be recommended only to an experienced Linux user, because many problems can appear when attempting to install and configure various programs.
For now, ARM-based computers can be recommended only when the cost of the computer, including the DRAM memory does not exceed $150.
Starting at $150 for computer + DRAM, it is possible to find computers with Intel Alder Lake N CPUs (e.g. N100, N200 or i3-N305). These are much faster than any ARM-based computer, with the exception of those that are many times more expensive (like those sold by NVIDIA, MediaTek or Qualcomm).
The NanoPi is quite reasonable. There is a bigger one that has the I/O I need and a RK3588S, which is a pretty impressive SoC. I have an Orange Pi 5 with that SoC and the performance is beyond my expectations. I generally prefer stock Debian to OpenWRT anyway; I never know how to do what I want to do in the GUI, but I do know what iptables rules I want to write, so that's all good.
Of course not in stock, nothing good ever is, but someday...
https://www.friendlyelec.com/index.php?route=product/product...
This provides up to 4 x 2.5 Gb/s Ethernet ports, plus WiFi.
The passively-cooled metal box has 2 x 2.5 Gb/s Ethernet ports, but you can add another 2 ports with Ethernet USB dongles. It has a slow quadruple 2 GHz Cortex-A55 CPU, but this is still very fast in comparison with the older Raspberry Pi models and its Ethernet and USB ports are much better than those of any Raspberry Pi, allowing full speed.
The schematic of this firewall/router is public, which is good. Also, unlike for Intel or AMD CPUs, much more public documentation about the CPU is available, which makes it more trustworthy.
The RK3568 CPU has good Linux support, but even so, an ARM-based computer can be recommended only to an experienced Linux user, because many problems can appear when attempting to install and configure various programs.
For now, ARM-based computers can be recommended only when the cost of the computer, including the DRAM memory does not exceed $150.
Starting at $150 for computer + DRAM, it is possible to find computers with Intel Alder Lake N CPUs (e.g. N100, N200 or i3-N305). These are much faster than any ARM-based computer, with the exception of those that are many times more expensive (like those sold by NVIDIA, MediaTek or Qualcomm).