Tuesday, August 13, 2019

Are Puma 6 based modems still flawed?

I recently (ignorantly) purchased a Netgear CM700 about 7 days ago from best buy, as the sales rep explained the specs and it seemed sufficient for my needs (I didn't think I needed DOCSIS 3.1 and this one was the cheapest one offering 32x8 channels). Well just today I finally got a real router setup which performs much better than my laptop running as a hotspot but was curious about whether the modem has a built in NAT and whether it can be disabled.

The very first reply to that thread mentioned that I should return the unit because the Intel Puma 6 SoC ASIC has well-known problems. Sure enough I looked into it more and I see that it the chipset has some DoS vulnerabilities and latency spikes, and there were even rumors that a class action lawsuit would be filed against Arris a couple years back...

Personally I have not noticed any problems other than the modem getting very warm during operation. I had 2 terminals open for several minutes pinging the DNS servers 1.1.1.1 and 8.8.8.8 and latency was well within tolerable limits (about 9 to 13 milliseconds) I didn't notice any problems playing slither.io for extended periods either (besides poor graphical performance and frame drops on my old desktop)

I have not found definitive sources explaining the exact issue although one site mentioned that it may be due to an under-powered x86 CPU that is running some (RTOS presumably) which has too many higher priority processes/daemons running on it causing occasional latency spikes (?) Have their finally been patches released for this architecture that have addressed and hopefully fixed the latency issue?

TL;DR:

I recently purchased a Netgear CM700. The very first reply to that thread mentioned that I should return the unit because the Intel Puma 6 SoC ASIC has well-known problems. Have their finally been patches released for this architecture that have addressed and hopefully fixed the latency issue?



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