I first thought, oh noes I just got a RPi3, but then reading the specs I see it's not very different? USB2, 1GB RAM, A53, why would I (two weeks ago before ordering the Rpi) order this instead?
Gigabyte Ethernet for one, if you are using this in a project where Ethernet bandwidth is a problem, this would perform much better.
I actually want one of those RPi clones exactly because RPi performs so poor in I/O applications, since all external bandwidth is shared by one USB 2.0 HUB (including the Ethernet port, and more recently, Wi-Fi/Bluetooth). I use my RPi as a media server/torrent client, and it is severe limited in those situations.
As I understand, even adding a 1000M port to the RPi3 would not increase the network bandwidth. The limiting factor is bus and cpu. My RPi3 Model B maxes out from speedtest.net at around 91Mbps. From my iMac I get 180Mbps (throttled from my provider) not the Mac.
Yeah, on the Pi the ethernet is still hanging off the USB2 bus. That wouldn’t be too bad if the various ports had their own buses, but unfortunately everything is hanging off a single usb interface coming out of the core cpu, so although the raw bandwidth is there to make 1G ethernet potentially worthwhile - you can plug in a 1G USB device if you want to - but as soon as you actually want to do anything you get contention on the bus and your throughput drops like the proverbial rock.
No, it won't - because the ethernet on RPi is actually going over USB. The CPU doesn't have a built-in ethernet peripheral. So adding a gigabyte port would be pointless - the bottleneck would still be the USB bus.
The data rate over USB2 after accounting for overheads is a lot faster than 100Mbit, so it’s not entirely pointless - you would be able to serve cache files faster for instance. But as soon as you have anything else hitting that bus, your real world bandwidth is going to be < 100MBit.
Since 1G is more power hungry than 100MBit interfaces as well IIRC you can understand why the Pi people decided to stick with 100MBit.
