A 1.6Tbps switch now costs $1,100 and runs on 123 watts, because AI clusters moved onto desks
ServeTheHome measured 1.567Tbps through MikroTik's four-port 400GbE box. That is 98% of line rate from a half-width desktop unit with an Amazon chip doing the management.
ServeTheHome measured 1.567Tbps through a MikroTik CRS804-4DDQ-hRM on Keysight CyPerf and 1.589Tbps on IxNetwork, from a half-width desktop box with four 400GbE ports that lists at $1,295 and street-prices near $1,100. That works out to $0.69 per Gbps, and to about 98% of nominal line rate.
This cheap 1.6Tbps switch has 4x 400GbE ports, lowering the price ($0.69/1Gbps) for local AI clusters and those who just want fast networking t.co/W9yGwF9kho
But the number that should stop you is the power draw. The switch idles at 29.3W and is rated at 123W maximum. ServeTheHome's own point of comparison is a cheap used 32-port 100GbE switch, which "can easily draw 900W or more." Do the division and this box costs 0.077 watts per gigabit against roughly 0.28 for the used bargain — better than three and a half times the efficiency, in a unit you can leave on a desk at 40-odd decibels.
Why does a product like this exist now? Because somebody has to connect eight NVIDIA GB10s in a room without a data centre. ServeTheHome has been running exactly that: the RDMA backend for an 8-way GB10 cluster on one of these for months, and a GB300 Station cluster on another with DR4 optics. Four ports is not a topology. It is a pod. Desktop AI boxes made a market for a four-port top-of-rack, and MikroTik got there first at this price.
Open it up and the bill of materials explains the number. Switching is a Marvell 98DX7335A1, a 5nm Prestera part with 32 lanes of 50Gbps (which is 1.6Tbps and not a gigabit more). Management runs on an Annapurna Labs AL52400, a quad-core CPU from Amazon's chip division, with what looks like 4GB of ECC memory beside it.
An Amazon-designed processor, in a Latvian budget switch, on a desk in a lab. That is where custom silicon ends up.
So here is the hard limit worth knowing before you buy, and it is not the port count. The link between that management CPU and the switch ASIC runs at 10Gbps. Anything you route through the CPU path — firewalling, deep inspection, anything RouterOS does in software — is capped there, whatever the front panel says. ServeTheHome is blunt about it: not enough performance to be a 1.6Tbps firewall.
And the counter-case for spending more is real. Four ports splits into eight 200GbE or sixteen 100GbE, and then you are done. Larger topologies want a proper spine, and the ports are QSFP56-DD rather than the QSFP112 on a GB300 Station (or the OSFP on Spectrum-X gear), so optics and DACs become a separate shopping problem. Getting NCCL and RDMA running took MTU changes, PFC and switch-feature work — though ServeTheHome notes that since roughly February an AI agent can read MikroTik's documentation and produce a working configuration, which is its own small sign of the times.
Our read is that this is the first switch priced as though small AI clusters are an ordinary product category rather than a lab curiosity, and that the price will keep falling, because a 32×50G Marvell part sells into a market far larger than desktop pods. We would expect a four-port 400GbE desktop switch under $1,000 street before the middle of 2027.
One caveat from the review that no spec sheet will tell you: the rear-heavy power supplies will tip a small rack over.
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