No surprise the official website has no info about the company (e.g. who is the CEO of this company by the way? A name at least...?). Of course there is no info, as I suspected its a single person doing everything. One man show.
Some factual mistakes I have read in this lengthy thread (not going to individually jump to each post to reply there):
APU2-3-4-5-6 all models running literally the same ~10 year old obsolete prehistoric SoC / CPU. And to be precise, its clock speed is just 1.0Ghz! Not 1.4Ghz! It makes a huge difference in this case, ~40%. The 1.4Ghz is a boost clock speed, and its only possible for a single (1!) core, and only while the other 3 cores are literally idle. The 1.2Ghz boost is an interim clock speed though. Quite unrealistic sustained workload, right? So if you want to calculate performance based on clockspeed and IPC, you'd need to assume the 1.0Ghz, and not the 1.4. By the way, this CPU boost feature was broken since inception, until 2019, so literally only 1.0Ghz was possible even for single core workloads until that time. Have to mention it was a PITA for the firmware developer subcontractor (a word about this as well below) to make it work with lot of sweat and blood and tears. Thanks to AMD being a jerk, and not providing any support document for these folks. (People assume its only Intel who the dick company is. But I can assure everyone, AMD is the same arrogant profit-oriented a..hole company, as Intel. No difference! Just because Zen is successful in the past t-6 yrs, AMD is still a difficult company to deal with, if you are an embedded system integrator partner of theirs. End of rant.)
- ECC: thats another misleading feature: its mentioned (very only in the schematics PDF, nowhere else you will find this technical info clearly written in the APU2 models page: only the 4GB RAM model has ECC. The 2GB models DO NOT HAVE ECC! As a proof, you can see it for a fraction of second when the BIOS boots, and you see the RAM information. If you bought a 2GB board, believing you'll also have ECC, you are screwed!
Intel 210 vs 211 NIC: because the quad-core CPU in this prehistoric SoC is so low powered, it DOES MATTER that the i210 supports 4TX&RX queue, but the i211 only supports 2! So if your workload is heavy packet processing, the i210 is a must! As the i211 wont be able to distribute packets evenly among all the 4 cores, only between 2, so performance will suffer.
Bonus little known fact: PPPoE protocol does not support the RSS (Receive Side Scaling) protocol, because PPPoE is NOT based on IP. So all your PPPoE traffic will hammer CPU0, and that core only. Performance will suffer. Nowhere near close to gigabit routing under such conditions buddy! Just you wont read this caveat anywhere, thanks "sponspored" reviewers, hiding this painful fact! The internet is full of people complaining about their gigabit speed not achieved, and it always turns out a PPPoE-type of subscription is in service.
Firmware: because pcengines is a 1manshow company, he (she?) outsourced writing the BIOS for APU to a polish company called 3mdeb. When you buy an APU, you rely on a 3rd party company to provide coreboot BIOS support.
As if you bought a motherboard from Asus or Gigabyte, but the UEFI comes from an "unknown" company. When they bankcrupt, and you go to Asus/Gigabyte, they will tell you: sorry, but the bios is not provided by us for your motherboard, go complain to that company who (was) responsible for it! Sounds strange, right?
So in short, there is no such thing as a default non-coreboot BIOS in the APU product. This became an issue, when people wanted to see improvements on the BIOS, and the PCENGINES github issue tracker was full of open items. And the 1manshow pcengines company replied that its 3mdeb who writes the bios, pcengines doesnt deal with such topics. Contractually the customer bought a product, that is branded as PCENGINES, not a oroduct that has the 3mdeb logo on it, I hope you see my point.
But anyway, this was sort of ok until very recently. In Aug 2022, the continuous flow of coreboot releases for APU stoppes suddenly. Feeling the coming bankruptcy of pcengines, 3mdeb backtracked from the relationship this February (the CEO of 3mdeb confirmed this on various forums). So everyone who is following the story knew, that pcengines APU is officially dead by now.
Last point: it is very disappointing, that this product will be gone. While it had its limitations and weaknesses, it was a so-so performant and reliable x86 router solution. As many pointed out, full-x86-64 compatibilits, noFAN, ECC, multi-NIC support was the pros. Cannot understand why on earth there are no other zen1-2-3based embedded routers in the 10Watt-range, that consumers could buy, without paying the artificial "embedded-so-it-will-cost-100%-more" TAX? Also I have to question PCENGINES 1manshow person as well: built a product 6 years ago (if I am not mistaken, APU2 has been released in 2016-17?), the EOL of the SoC was known on the 1st day. But did not prepare another alternative, based the whole company on literally only 1 product (apu2-3-4-5-6 are all based on the same SoC, so technically they are still 1 product, even if there are differences in the # of NICs, and the SIM slots). So when the known EOL time comes, hasnt prepared for a new product? Yes I know, AMD to blame. But seriously, throwing away this whole market segment?
Some factual mistakes I have read in this lengthy thread (not going to individually jump to each post to reply there):
APU2-3-4-5-6 all models running literally the same ~10 year old obsolete prehistoric SoC / CPU. And to be precise, its clock speed is just 1.0Ghz! Not 1.4Ghz! It makes a huge difference in this case, ~40%. The 1.4Ghz is a boost clock speed, and its only possible for a single (1!) core, and only while the other 3 cores are literally idle. The 1.2Ghz boost is an interim clock speed though. Quite unrealistic sustained workload, right? So if you want to calculate performance based on clockspeed and IPC, you'd need to assume the 1.0Ghz, and not the 1.4. By the way, this CPU boost feature was broken since inception, until 2019, so literally only 1.0Ghz was possible even for single core workloads until that time. Have to mention it was a PITA for the firmware developer subcontractor (a word about this as well below) to make it work with lot of sweat and blood and tears. Thanks to AMD being a jerk, and not providing any support document for these folks. (People assume its only Intel who the dick company is. But I can assure everyone, AMD is the same arrogant profit-oriented a..hole company, as Intel. No difference! Just because Zen is successful in the past t-6 yrs, AMD is still a difficult company to deal with, if you are an embedded system integrator partner of theirs. End of rant.)
- ECC: thats another misleading feature: its mentioned (very only in the schematics PDF, nowhere else you will find this technical info clearly written in the APU2 models page: only the 4GB RAM model has ECC. The 2GB models DO NOT HAVE ECC! As a proof, you can see it for a fraction of second when the BIOS boots, and you see the RAM information. If you bought a 2GB board, believing you'll also have ECC, you are screwed!
Intel 210 vs 211 NIC: because the quad-core CPU in this prehistoric SoC is so low powered, it DOES MATTER that the i210 supports 4TX&RX queue, but the i211 only supports 2! So if your workload is heavy packet processing, the i210 is a must! As the i211 wont be able to distribute packets evenly among all the 4 cores, only between 2, so performance will suffer.
Bonus little known fact: PPPoE protocol does not support the RSS (Receive Side Scaling) protocol, because PPPoE is NOT based on IP. So all your PPPoE traffic will hammer CPU0, and that core only. Performance will suffer. Nowhere near close to gigabit routing under such conditions buddy! Just you wont read this caveat anywhere, thanks "sponspored" reviewers, hiding this painful fact! The internet is full of people complaining about their gigabit speed not achieved, and it always turns out a PPPoE-type of subscription is in service.
Firmware: because pcengines is a 1manshow company, he (she?) outsourced writing the BIOS for APU to a polish company called 3mdeb. When you buy an APU, you rely on a 3rd party company to provide coreboot BIOS support.
As if you bought a motherboard from Asus or Gigabyte, but the UEFI comes from an "unknown" company. When they bankcrupt, and you go to Asus/Gigabyte, they will tell you: sorry, but the bios is not provided by us for your motherboard, go complain to that company who (was) responsible for it! Sounds strange, right?
So in short, there is no such thing as a default non-coreboot BIOS in the APU product. This became an issue, when people wanted to see improvements on the BIOS, and the PCENGINES github issue tracker was full of open items. And the 1manshow pcengines company replied that its 3mdeb who writes the bios, pcengines doesnt deal with such topics. Contractually the customer bought a product, that is branded as PCENGINES, not a oroduct that has the 3mdeb logo on it, I hope you see my point.
But anyway, this was sort of ok until very recently. In Aug 2022, the continuous flow of coreboot releases for APU stoppes suddenly. Feeling the coming bankruptcy of pcengines, 3mdeb backtracked from the relationship this February (the CEO of 3mdeb confirmed this on various forums). So everyone who is following the story knew, that pcengines APU is officially dead by now.
Last point: it is very disappointing, that this product will be gone. While it had its limitations and weaknesses, it was a so-so performant and reliable x86 router solution. As many pointed out, full-x86-64 compatibilits, noFAN, ECC, multi-NIC support was the pros. Cannot understand why on earth there are no other zen1-2-3based embedded routers in the 10Watt-range, that consumers could buy, without paying the artificial "embedded-so-it-will-cost-100%-more" TAX? Also I have to question PCENGINES 1manshow person as well: built a product 6 years ago (if I am not mistaken, APU2 has been released in 2016-17?), the EOL of the SoC was known on the 1st day. But did not prepare another alternative, based the whole company on literally only 1 product (apu2-3-4-5-6 are all based on the same SoC, so technically they are still 1 product, even if there are differences in the # of NICs, and the SIM slots). So when the known EOL time comes, hasnt prepared for a new product? Yes I know, AMD to blame. But seriously, throwing away this whole market segment?