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by Hikikomori 9 days ago
I mean thats a swouter.
2 comments

It's not, really, it's a basic commodity CPU with some RAM for the purposes of running the OS and management plane, glued to a layer 2 switch chip by a very narrow bandwidth path. A mikrotik switch such as this isn't intended to be used for any of the real layer 3 features of mikrotik routeros like routing, nat, ospf, bgp, mikrotik's own weird EoIP tunnels, etc.

The problem is that people might login to it for the first time and see all of the feature set of RouterOS v7 available to them to start configuring things from the ssh CLI or web GUI. It might look the same at first glance as something that is actually a small router like the RB760IGS.

It would probably be better if mikrotik included some kind of red text warning "this is not really a router" if people start entering layer 3 stuff into it (other than its own management IP, SNMP, NTP servers, etc).

Same concept for the other very cheap mikrotik switches that are like 4 or 8 ports of 1000BaseT.

It's still that, capability matters. Even with enterprise products like Cisco you'll need to look at hardware diagrams to understand limitations, some you won't find out unless you test or pay for an expensive support contract and can ask specific questions.
Scroll down to the ethernet test results.

In lab optimal conditions it can route 1.2G

It has 4 10G SFP+ ports.

If you enable Queues AND Firewall Filters you will be down below 500M of throughput. Potentially less. If you ask this thing to do anything complex its going to shit itself.

Now have a look at the block diagram. Note that the internal link between the 800MHz processor and the switch chip shows 1.3G.

It would be an embarrassing cock up to deploy this as a router for a client. Even if you only need 1.3G of routing, there are better products.

Just like most enterprise network products. Sometimes it's not enough to look at hardware diagrams, need to test or have an expensive support contract and the ability to ask the right questions to understand limitations.