The bigger issue that pfSense will run into is limitations on FreeBSD packet handling. This may be informative as to where pfSense is going.
Thanks Patrick,
I admit I am not a network guy, but after listening to the video and doing a quick internet lookup for VPP (
VPP/What is VPP? - fd.io), and in particular listening to a comment the presenter made (I am paraphrasing) regarding his son building a 10 core i7 rig with a 40gbe connection for testing/demo purposes, the i7 not even getting close to the CPU topping out, saturating the network connection caught my attention.
The combination of video and quick research suggests, for my purposes, the new pfsense architecture for 3.0 may handle the load I suggested in my above note with (perhaps, my speculation completely) an 8 core Atom processor will do the trick.
I only wish more more graphs were available, and a better sense of when 3.0 will be available. Also, based on the link above VPP does not run on FreeBSD so looks like a change may be in the works.
In any case, this all suggests to me that perhaps I should wait a bit to see what pfsense comes out with before making a hardware decision.
Thanks for the intel!!!!