XG Firewall specifically states Intel hardware, but is that just a way of saying an x86/x64 bit platform? My UTM 9 is currently on an AMD socket FM2 ITX box, I would like to keep this hardware.
So i have the same Question.... If this is for Intel only systems im curious as to why Sophos went this direction as it segments significant user base from its OS.
Intel is a chipset, if you review the intel site you will find that they use some of amd functions. If your amd chip is intel compatible which most are it will work. But the performance of the current amd chipsets is way behind the intel versions. Also the amd chips are power hungry when compared to the same intel performance criteria. If this ois not an issue for you please try your setup out and report back to this forum.
The only two reasons AFAIK to push for Intel Architecture is because of the Instruction sets for handling encryption are incredibly efficient and allow for a lot of offloading of the encryption stuff away from main processing (If the processor has the AES instruction set). The other is that Intel is reputably better than AMD for Single Threaded Processing.
This is coming from a person who's been running AMD since as far back as my memory stretches and the only piece of Intel hardware to grace my home with it's presence is a Zotac Zbox running my UTM v9. The vast majority of functions used by Sophos ASG/XG are single threaded and very processor intensive. Take Intrusion Prevention for instance, that process alone can wipe out an entire core just on it's own and does not distribute it's functions across multiple threads. Because of this, AMD cannot shine because it's built from the ground up for a multi-thread architecture.
AMD is compatible with ASG/XG, it's just not as good as Intel in this scenario else I would have built an FX-8350 mITX UTM by now.