In terms of direct comparisons based on the spec sheet and information that is published in the gl-infra-builder…
- The MT3000 doesn’t have an SD card.
- The AXT1800 should have better Wireguard performance (and presumably IPSec performance) given its extra cores. Likewise it might (eventually) have better OpenVPN performance.
- Given similar clock speeds and Cortex-A53 cores, both should perform similarly on userland/single core tasks (OpenVPN, Tailscale, etc.)
- The MT3000 should run on an aarch64 compile and at least a v5.4 kernel, as opposed to the AXT1800’s armv7 and v4.4. This likely won’t have a huge impact to most people but the 4.4 kernel is almost 9 years old at this point, and backporting (e.g. Wireguard) is a pain.
- continuing on #4, my guess is that the MT7981 is going to get mainline (and hence upstream OpenWRT) support way before the ipq6018. In the long run this probably means better driver support, possibly longer support windows, etc.
- The spec sheet indicates that the MT3000 is basically the size of the Beryl/Slate Plus, so there are some size/weight savings as well.
- Hard to know what the price is going to be, but I assume the MT3000 will be cheaper than the AXT1800 based both on features and on the Mediatek vs. Qualcomm chip. The Brume 2 is only $70USD, so if they hit close to that price target (also the current street price of the outgoing Beryl) it seems like the MT3000 is a no brainer compared to the Slate Plus, and probably even compared to the AXT1800 for most people.