Simple, silent and with AMD Geode on board

ALIX motherboards are low-power, small-sized boards designed for building multifunctional network devices, as well as thin clients.

I will not dare to compare this iron with CISCO in this topic, but it is in itself worthy of attention.

ALIX boards are made (of course, in Taiwanese factories) by the Swiss company PC Engines .
Today I will talk about the ALIX.2d13 platform and a router based on it.
As in the last post , we will focus on the network platform. I recall that

A network platform is hardware designed to work in telecommunications networks, with software installed, tailored to specific network tasks (routing, NAT, VPN, proxy, firewall, etc.).

• The boards use an AMD Geode chip with low power consumption, due to which the device consumes only 6-10W in load.
• The x86 architecture makes it possible to use any popular system as an OS, be it FreeBSD, Linux, or specialized distributions based on them. In test mode, on boards ( models with VGA), Windows XP Embedded was launched.
• AMD Geode LX Security Block, an auxiliary cryptographic unit that supports AES-128 hardware crypto-acceleration, as well as hardware random number generator.

• Each Ethernet port has its own controller, which ensures maximum performance of the Ethernet subsystem.
• MiniPCI expansion slots allow you to connect peripherals, ranging from a POST - diagnostic card, ending with Gigabit Ethernet, RS-232, and CAN - controllers.
• The alix.6f2 cards also have a MiniPCI-E slot for connecting internal 3G modems, and support for hybrid MultiWAN configurations with load balancing appears: 3 WAN + WiFi LAN / Ethernet + 3G / Ethernet + Wi-Fi / Wi-Fi + 3G

Here are the dry features of alix.2d13 running pfSense 2.0.3:

Model	Alix.2d13 pfSense
Active sessions	50,000 (Limited by RAM size)
Bandwidth at incl. traffic filtering	86 Mbps / port
IPSec VPN throughput	25+ Mbps (AES-128) 15.5 Mbps (AES-256) 13.7 Mbps (3DES)
Max. number of VPN sessions (PPTP)	1,500
Multi-Wan and load balancing	2 WAN load balancing
Reservation scheme	Active / Standby
CPU features	500Mhz AMD Geode LX CPU + AMD Geode LX Security Block
Memory	256MB
Storage	4GB Compact Flash (2.5 ”HDD / SSD available)
Interfaces	3 x VIA VT6105M Fast Ethernet
Virtual Interfaces (VLAN)	~ 500-1000
power usage	5-10W
Intrusion Prevention System	Snort
Antispam, Phishing Filter, URL Filter	Squid squidguard
Safe content (Antivirus, etc.)	HAVP

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Ps. We offer Habrayuzer 5% discount on the entire range of alix boards and routers based on them.