AM1 platform as a router

Wondering if anyone knows more about the performance characteristics of the AM1/ kabini platform for a simple pf sense box or if alternate intel or SOC products offer a better value (simply talking performance and cost, power consumption isn't an issue) From what I'm seeing you can easily slap in a drive a couple dual port ethernet cards and a wireless and be set but reviews online for how it handles workloads are a bit scarce.

I have been considering switching to the AM1 platform for my main gateway for a while now. My current platform is an Watchguard X750e that uses an older Pentium M and 2GB of RAM.

This platform has very little power but easily gets around 850Mbps between interfaces and is perfectly capable of driving the WAN connection.

The CPU itself is only clocked at 2.26GHz, only 32-bit and with a singular core. Plus it only has 2MB of L2 cache.

So in comparison, the AM1 chips (even the cheapest Sempron) should blow this platform out of the water.

I don't think you can go wrong tbh. However, don't put a wireless card in pfSense, it just does not play well with them. You will get better performance through a dedicated wireless AP.

That is very good news for this little chip. Thanks for the info on the wireless card, it would likely be better to have an additional two ports in any case for future expansion.

i have one as a streaming and light gaming machine ant its amazing fir the price. id say with a pcie Ethernet card it would make a badass router 

For wireless, IPfire is more likely than PfSense to work with whatever wireless hardware you already have or find cheap, just because more wireless hardware is supported in Linux than BSD.  Setup is just as simple as PfSense.

have a look at one of these - dual gigabit ethernet, and an intel J1900 quad core cpu.

http://www.pccasegear.com/index.php?main_page=product_info&cPath=138_1019&products_id=27760