Hello just checking in to see if maybe a Netgate 6100 review would coming out?
Eventually there will be.
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Oh yeah! I’m looking forward to this!!! 
Spesh the technical breakdown on how the chip divvying out the through put on this appliance. Loved your explanations on how NetGate products do this.
What disappoints me with the 6100 is it is using exactly the same CPU as the 5100 and the 7100. It’s just a difference in RAM, drive space, and switching vs not switching that makes different outcomes on performance. But the difference in performance is always going to be constrained by that CPU because it’s such a low performant CPU (it benchmarks just above 2000). It’s a very low powered CPU and will still sit in the same class as 5100, 7100 - just different choices on the configuration of how to use that CPU. Yes, pfsense do a great job at that end of the market if all you want to do is run rulesets, NAT, and maybe an IPSEC VPN and manage to achieve different results within that using the same CPU on the different variants (5100, 6100, 7100) the 6100 does look like the better box to get - but in my view its just more of the same. If you want to run gigabit, and start to build out from that with various CPU intensive packages, the box won’t handle it due to CPU limitations.
I would have hoped that a much more powerful CPU came out and that there was something really decent that closed the big gap between the above devices and the 1357 and 1451 ie there is a HUGE gap between the 5100 / 6100 / 7100 class and the 1357 / 1451.
That’s the gap I am interested in seeing them fill plus replace the 1357 and 1451 with better CPU’s as they are six years old (well the 1541 is) and it only has a CPU benchmark of 9000 and a poor single core rating. I’d like to see much more powerful boxes that allows for CPU intensive packages to run and make the box fly, and I also have a personal choice of running desktop (silent) computers than noisy as jet engine hell of a rack mounted server 
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I look forward to it as it’s at the top of my wish list for wired upgrades at this time.
I do not think the cpu will present much of a problem for this build, that being said a non-atom quad or 6 core would likely provide some substantial improvements since they tend to have more cache onboard and better memory controllers.
@Larrikin Besides the 10GBE ports that looks interesting to route internal traffic properly, I have to agree with you and is also why I switched from pfsense to Fortgate in my lab. Since Netgate is not using proprietary ASIC to handle traffic, I really wonder how their specs can say that it L3 forwarding is able to do 18+ Gbps, and the firewall 10Gbps with 10k ACLs, even for just 1 flow. Having 8GB of RAM in the unit will not change the fact that the cpu is a low performing one and with multiple sessions going on from multiple sources those number can’t be achieved because, as you said, it is the same exact machine as the 5100 and 7100 which both can’t do that. Adding more RAM doesn’t provide direct computing power.
And if you start to add packages for filtering, etc, the cpu will top out quite fast. A pfsense vm will provide more throughput (on appropriate virtualization environment) than this physical box just because you have better underlying cpu with much faster cores.
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The only way you’ll get something asic powered is to buy their other PfSense product which is API based I think, Tensr. ASIC’s tend to cost a fortune but they usually work better.