What are the exact differences? I only find cooperations to other routers.
Not sure if this is supposed to be live yet, but …
Effectively it looks like a Brume 2 with wifi in the body of a Beryl.
It’s seems that so far…
Supports VPN Cascading,
OpenVPN speed up to 150 Mbps,
Memory / Storage = DDR4 512MB / NAND Flash 256MB,
2.5G Multi-Gig port,
Wi-Fi Speed = 574Mbps (2.4GHz), 2402Mbps (5GHz),
Ethernet Speed = WAN Port: 10/100/1000/2500Mbps,
Outlook of the router
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.
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The biggest difference is that the AXT1800 is quad core CPU, while MT3000 is dual core. MT3000 has DDR4 memory while AXT1800 has DDR3L. MT3000 also has double the storage space, 256 vs 128. MT3000 has double the wifi speed on AX 5ghz, 2402Mbps vs 1200Mbps. MT3000 has one 2.5gbit Ethernet port, while both on the AXT1800 are 1gbit only. The AXT1800 has 3 Ethernet ports while the MT3000 only as 2. AXT1800 has a microsd slot while the MT3000 does not.
How this affects performance, well, if you are running services that require a lot of CPU power, the quad core CPU on the AXT1800 will be better. For other tasks, the MT3000 is superior across the board.
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The performance point is really only true if you’re running applications that are multi-core optimized (or lots of parallel applications). Posted benchmarks (on OpenVPN) suggest that for many/most tasks the two should be roughly equivalent.
Wireguard should run faster, and you might see a difference if you loaded something like suricata/snort (why would you?), but other than that I suspect most people’s day to day experience would be similar.
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It’s not uncommon to run a webserver on the router, this uses a lot of threads and processes.
And as i wrote, across the board the MT3000 is superior, just in wifi and 2.5gbit port alone, both future proofing the router and speed between wifi devices. NAS to devices over wifi is a common use case, with new devices all being Wifi 6. Double the wifi speed helps with that.
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Color me skeptical, but I doubt many people are running webservers from a 512mb ram device. I certainly wouldn’t call it common. nginx or haproxy to an internal server? More likely, but still uncommon I wager. My guess is that VPN traffic is the most common CPU intensive task (possibly samba, but I think that is also single threaded).
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Package download statistics say another story about webserver usage 
. Things like Grafana are very useful with IOT devices and other home automation tasks. It can use a lot of CPU collecting data from many sources.
SQM/QoS or just showing client download/upload stats are very CPU intensive tasks that a lot of users are running as well.
So again it will depend on what you are using the router for. If you are doing the above, then the AXT1800 is better, but you will suffer with the smaller flash size. Users have circumvented this with extroot without much issues though.
For a home router with nothing of the above, the wifi will still be better, which is what a router is mainly used for. VPN is already so fast that for most people this makes no difference between the 2. You will max out any provider without issues (depending on location, if you are next to the VPN server on a main network node, then maybe not).
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I think we agree that for most people there will not be a substantial day-to-day difference between the two. I also agree that for most people the difference between 300mbps and 550mbps of VPN traffic is not functionally different in daily usage. (or, honestly, 150mbps vs 550mbps).
I think my take (and where we might disagree) would be that if the MT3000 isn’t powerful enough for you, the AXT1800 probably won’t be either. Users who need more power than either of these devices offer are probably better served by stepping up into a low-end x86 platform running either OpenWRT or pf/OPNSense.
p.s. I routinely get 800-900mpbs over my IPSec links to work with about 20% CPU util. But not with a GL-iNet product 
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Interesting discussion. I have the Slate AXT1800, one of the things that I don’t like so much is the power draw and size (I still have a TP-Link WR902AC which ran off ‘3 electrons’) but I guess quad core needs more power (even though you can actually run it on lower amps, as I understand from other threads - if you are not using too many devices like disks on the USB port etc.).
So, end result gleaned from the above would be that for the average (travel) user who wants occasional VPN usage, strong Wifi usage, small device, lower power, doesn’t use the SD Card, the MT3000 is (by far) the better bet?
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Based on the above link, the MT3000 should be basically the same size as the Beryl/Slate Plus. That’s still quite a bit bigger than the original Slate, and certainly larger than the WR902AC, but it’s also close to 10x faster on OpenVPN, which seems like an acceptable tradeoff to me. Of course, I’d love something the size of the original AR750, but somehow I don’t think that’s happening any time soon.
For a travel router, the size and weight combined with basically equivalent performance makes the MT3000 much more compelling from my standpoint. At the end of the day both of them are probably going to require a decent USB-C source, so I’m not sure that is a huge selling point between them.
To me, aside from the size/weight, the underlying software support is the biggest differentiator between the two. I certainly would take an MT3000 running a more modern kernel with a chance of real upstream OpenWRT support soon over the current situation on the AXT1800. The loss of the microSD card is a little disappointing, but overall it’s certainly a tradeoff I can live with given the various benefits.
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I think the price will be the most interesting. Is there already something known?
I upgraded to GL-AXT1800 from previous Beryl GL-MT1300 because I very depend on WireGuard and speed of WireGuard connection is the most important factor for me.
The change in size and weight wasn’t noticeable for me.
I smell a crowd funding source for a GL-MT3000 based on the GL-AR750S / Slate case design in Metal aluminum?
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The removal of the SD card slot is diasppointing.
I’d love to have the extra LAN port - but it’s wishful.
I just got the old Beryl from Amazon yesterday and tried it out.
It’s pretty decent. I saw that the MT3000 is available on pre-order and with the currency exchange, it’s about what I paid for the Beryl from Amazon.
Just wondering if I am feeling buyer’s remorse because I did buy the MT3000 on preorder and maybe should have got the AXT1800 because of the card slot.
I also want to run Tailscale on the router. Hoping that’ll come built in via firmware. Anyone have an idea of the available free space capacity in the MT3000?
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Firmware 4.2 will include Tailscale.
If you don’t mind using the USB for a card reader you can still use an SD card with the mt3000. I got it on pre order and so far it’s nice compared to the axt1800 for use as a repeater with Adguard and samba running. I’ve got both but if your mobile the mt3000 is great for the price point
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Has anyone used both and can comment on the real world differences in speed? I’m not talking about the wireless speed of data transfer but in terms of handling samba shares with heavy internet traffic etc
No one mentioned about MU-MIMO?
It’s weird that beryl ax doesn’t have MU-MIMO support.