2. Internal Details

The increasingly powerful network processor chips coming onto the market make for generally simple board layouts. Figure 1 shows that the SL1000 is powered by a Philips PTD2210 Gateway-on-a-chip , which is clocked at 133MHz.

The Philips chip is a MIPS-based microcontroller with some pretty fancy on-board processing, including IPsec hardware acceleration for DES, 3DES, MD5 and SHA-1. As you'll see later in the Performance sections, this processor packs quite a punch!

Figure 1: SL1000 (and 500) board
(click on the image for a full-sized view)

The WAN port is handled by a Realtek iGateway firewall from Intoto, and IPsec VPN from SSH (since sold to SafeNet).

ASUS sent me both an SL500 and SL1000 so that I could test router-to-router IPsec tunnel performance. I opened up both routers and the boards looked identical to me. The only physical differences were the labels on the flash memory and an "SL500" label on its board.