No, not really. They are kinda pricey (> USD 100.- single pieces), require special powering, are huge and then also come in 3 different flavours: 2.4 GHz only, 5 GHz only or 6 GHz only (;-p).
has anyone seen or heard of half height mpcie 4x4 ax cards for client use? So far I have only found the Intel based ax200 and ax210 mpcie half height cards, but they are only 2x2.
I guess I could use full size card with n mpcie riser and a 6 inch extension cable going to a mpcie slot at the end and locate the card where my dvd use to go, but that seems....so....messy.....ugh I don't like messy.
So with those mpci-e card, is there any usb adapter board that do work with them ? I only found adapter with sim card slot.. more suit for 4g radio.. And at end, by being on usb, is the unit QCA9984 will then need special pakage for the usb as well .. ?
i've got an MT7915AN mini pci card from asiarf
I tried it inan openWrt VM using a SilverStone SST-ECWA1 mini-pci to pci adapter but did not get very far. Also the SST-ECWA1 only has 2 antenna connections rather than 4 so I do not know what I was thinking when I bought it.
I'll try again sooner or later but am not sure if I can stay on OpenWrt 22.02.2 (kernel 5.4) or should go for a snapshot that has kernal 5.10.
a) you want the newest kernel/ backports versions possible (master snapshots)
b) you don't want to complicate your situation more by using PCIe pass-through and a hypervisor setup (at least not in the early stages), run on the bare metal (from a USB stick, if you like, but without virtualization in the way).
c) you will have some debugging ahead of you
22.03rc1 is out and supports the Mediatek MT7915 chipset. As shown here the AsiaRF adapters seem to be an option.
Would the AsiaRF 7915 or 7615 would be an option for APU4 from PC Engines?
DBDC mode isn't working so I would need two cards in order to cover 2,4 and 5 GZ at the same time, right?
The thread also talks about specia power requirements from the slot. Would that be a problem for the APU4?
I would be slightly sceptical about this, for multiple reasons…
wifi5 and even more so wifi6 cards are rather power hungry, often beyond mini-PCIe spec (heat dissipation can also become a problem), as you already noted
the AMD Jaguar (GX-412TC) is already at its limits with routing at 1 GBit/s linespeed, but your wireless cards also need CPU power (and timely interrupt servicing), I'd be in doubt if the CPU would be fast enough to keep up with a wifi6 card (which can achieve throughput exceeding 1 GBit/s on short range)
for Mu-MIMO to work, the antennas need to have a certain distance to each other - that, and their sheer number (2*4 antennas plus pigtails) probably becomes rather difficult in the APU4 case
In the end, only you can try it - but I'd look into a hardware upgrade first (or outsource the wifi side to a dedicated AP).
At least one can reduce antenna amount from 8 to 4 via using diplexers (working great in Turris Omnias).
If talking about DBDC there is a special card sold that also reduces needed amount of antennas: AW7915-NPD. Yet following some threads it seems DBDC is still under heavy development.
Speeking about kernel and stuff - AW7915-NP1 is running like a charm since December on my Turris Omnia with adopted 22.01.x (TurrisOS v6 - maybe including some backports).
Thank you for the feedback.
The APU actually is my dedicated access point., I hope the CPU can handle the load.
The Asiarf AW7915-NPD seems to be the a nice option, thank you for the hint.
I consider ordering one or two. I will try to get information from PC-Engines about the power requirements.
SparkLAN just announced a new half mini-PCIe card (in addition to an M.2 2230 one) based on WCN6856 being a tri-band dual concurrent design. Looking at the spec I believe it should work in a regular slot providing a sustained 1.1 Amps of 3.3 volt power. However, not sure how concurrent RX/TX will behave in that sense. Will try to get some samples...
Can confirm, AW7915-NPD is functional in my APU2D4 on 22.03rc1.
Also testing two usb3 to 2.5Gbps Ethernet adapters.
Killer E3100 USB-C 3.1 to RJ-45 2.5Gbps Ethernet Adapter (100123) Realtek R8169 based
ASUS 2.5G Ethernet USB Adapter (USB-C2500) Realtek R8152 based
I have both the 2.5G ethernet adapters connected now to a powered hub. I know i will only be able to possibly use one.
Disappointingly my AEX-QCA6391-NI1 is not cooperating.
At what CPU usage (htop, to get figures for all individual cores)?
The old jaguar cores of the apu2 are pretty much at the end of their usefulness merely routing 1 GBit/s at wirespeed, I can't imaging these boards to profit much from USB ethernet- or 802.11ax wireless cards (and the unsteady bitrates do seem to support this guess).
801.11ax are on the power hungry side of things and running hot, I wouldn't be surprised quite a lot of them to exceed mini-PCIe standards and the abilities of most mainboards to cope with.
Very possible, but the 6391 is supposed to be very low power. I mean I was running two QCA9880 in here until now. With only 1 11ax card installed it should be ok I would think. flipping back to the mt now will do some wifi iperf and then some ethernet and then both.
I'll get more detailed in the morning but here is what I see. AX connections may talk big and say they are 1000Mbps but they seldom perform as high as 400Mbps. AC with the same card and same 80Mhz width on ch 104 performs in the high 600Mbps to mid 700Mbs range. I'm not sure if power is the issue or if the drivers are still just too immature. For reference I have seen my phone hit 800Mbs during iperf3 testing in the past on the QCA9880 cards.
For me the biggest part was to eliminate having to run 2 cards. This so far is stable and doing that.
If there is anything specific you'd like to see me try please let me know.
Oh and final note for the night, CPU is hitting about 50-70% on 1-2 cores the others aren't near as loaded.
I do see wireless throughput in excess of 1 GBit/s (my wired network is the bottleneck here, capping all testing to 1 GBit/s) with 80 MHz bandwidth in the 5 GHz band on ipq807x (4x4 Broadcom client); pretty much always at least 700 MBit/s in the same room (2x2 Intel ax200 client).