Raspberry Pi Hits 1GHz With Official 'Turbo Mode'

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Raspberry Pi Hits 1GHz With Official 'Turbo Mode'

Posted by Soulskill on Wednesday September 19, 2012 @08:38AM from the awesome-because-they-test-with-quake-3 dept.

hypnosec writes "The Raspberry Pi, which was recently used to build a cluster, has officially been given a 'Turbo Mode' by The Raspberry Pi Foundation, thus enabling overclocking. It will bump the frequency of the on-board processor as high as 1GHz as long as the temperature stays below 85C. The patch would dynamically increase the voltage and frequency of the core until the thermals hold. According to the Foundation, users have the option of choosing one of five peak frequencies, the highest being 1GHz."

23 of 92 comments (clear)

Min score:

Reason:

Sort:

No heatsink? by Anonymous Coward · 2012-09-19 08:42 · Score: 2, Interesting

Wouldn't this be more useful it they were shipping bolt on heat sinks?
1. Re:No heatsink? by Anonymous Coward · 2012-09-19 08:59 · Score: 5, Insightful
  
  This is not true if you actually read. The patch detects overheating and downscales the CPU frequency if it gets too hot. That doesn't sound to me like a heatsink is unnecessary.
2. Re:No heatsink? by TheGratefulNet · 2012-09-19 09:08 · Score: 3, Informative
  
  you can't heatsink the cpu. its UNDER the ram chip!
  what a stupid design. I own 2 Pi boards and I kinda like them, but this sandwich is not at all diy friendly. you can't fix things, you can't upgrade things, you can't even heatsink things.
  I know why they did this. but I still don't appreciate this kind of approach.
  
  --
  
  --
  "It is now safe to switch off your computer."
3. Re:No heatsink? by Lehk228 · 2012-09-19 09:21 · Score: 2
  
  it looks like a northbridge cooler would be perfect for the job, either fanned or fanless
  
  --
  Snowden and Manning are heroes.
4. Re:No heatsink? by viperidaenz · 2012-09-19 09:26 · Score: 2
  
  anti-heatsink technology
  
  They call it "package on package". Someone in a meeting said "How can we increase the thermal resistance between the CPU and any heatsink someone wants to put on it?". The solution was to put another chip on top of the CPU.
5. Re:No heatsink? by Anonymous Coward · 2012-09-19 09:28 · Score: 4, Insightful
  
  what a stupid design
  It's an ingenius design for their actual intended goal: A tiny and cheap computer to aid in kids education.
  Remember that, and realize anything they do purely for the sake of the DIY community should come highly appreciated.
6. Re:No heatsink? by TheGratefulNet · 2012-09-19 09:28 · Score: 2
  
  I do agree and I plan to use some vga 'chipset coolers' that I bought and never used, years ago.
  that will *help* but it does not do much for the cpu below it.
  but yes, I plan to and suggest doing such. as long as it stays on and does not go for some 'round the world tour' (lol) if it comes unstuck and bounces around inside your case.
  
  --
  
  --
  "It is now safe to switch off your computer."
7. Re:No heatsink? by CanHasDIY · 2012-09-19 09:38 · Score: 5, Funny
  
  They call it "package on package".
  Would Google for specs, but afraid of getting gay porn by mistake...
  
  --
  An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
8. Re:No heatsink? by Lumpy · 2012-09-19 11:54 · Score: 2
  
  if there is any contact between the packages you will get thermal conduction.
  
  --
  Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
9. Re:No heatsink? by rastos1 · 2012-09-19 19:25 · Score: 2
  
  It seems that the hottest part is actually not the CPU but the ethernet/USB controller.
10. Re:No heatsink? by makomk · 2012-09-19 20:55 · Score: 2
  
  That apparently varies from board to board because in many cases it's the result of a hardware design flaw that was quietly fixed in the latest board revision. They screwed up and accidentally connected the output of the onboard 1.8 V regulator on the LAN chip to the 1.8 V power rail on the board. Depending on the actual voltage each of the two 1.8 V regulators is trying to regulate down to, the LAN chip's regulator winds up supplying some or all of the current for that rail. That regulator is not actually designed to power external components - its output is only connected to a pin because it needs an external capacitor - and overloading it causes the chip to get very hot. As per usual the RasPi Foundation banned the person who pointed this out from their forum.
11. Re:No heatsink? by tommeke100 · 2012-09-19 22:00 · Score: 2
  
  They call it "package on package".
  Would Google for specs, but afraid of getting gay porn by mistake...
  Would Google for specs, but "afraid" of getting gay porn "by mistake"...
  
  There, fixed it for you ;-)
12. Re:No heatsink? by Alioth · 2012-09-19 22:25 · Score: 2
  
  It doesn't need an HDTV to display. It can use any old analogue TV set - it has composite video out. It can also use any old DVI monitor. Being able to plug straight into both HDMI and DVI monitors cover the vast majority of monitors and TVs out there. The analogue composite video addresses those who can only get hold of a cast-off TV (most likely for free). USB keyboards and mice cost buttons.
  The other thing is most school computers are locked down tighter than a duck's ass, and many schools will never entertain proper programming on the great majority of their computers. As such, the school might have a whole heap of PCs, but none are actually available to learn how a computer works, they are just glorified typewriters. This is a big problem in the UK - "IT classes" today are actually not information technology classes, they are just office skills classes, i.e. how to type, and how to use a spreadsheet (and a proprietary one at that). The Pi can be used as a standalone device which doesn't even need to be on the network, where a student is free to do whatever they want without making the IT department fear they will break something - because if the student buggers up the filesystem, for instance, you just reimage the SD card and you're done. The student can use their own SD card if they like. They can just use the keyboard, mouse and monitor of the computer the school won't let them use for programming.
  
  --
  Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
Ah, to be young again... by fuzzyfuzzyfungus · 2012-09-19 08:47 · Score: 3, Insightful

If I hadn't grown out of my...thermally adventurous... computing phase, I'd be lamenting the fact that the RPi's Package-on-Package SoC design means that the RAM is on top of the CPU, which severely limits the amount of fanatically-careful lapping to perfect the thermal transfer between the CPU die and the somewhat outrageous heatsink I could perform without destroying the system RAM and making it fairly useless....
(More generally, does anybody know how much headroom these weedy little power-constrained chips have? Are they generally frequency limited by comparatively cheap fab processes, or design tradeoffs of various sorts, or could somebody willing to feed them 30 watts rather than .3watts and provide them with a heatsink larger than the cellphone they were designed to power hit a genuinely substantial overclock?)
1. Re:Ah, to be young again... by allanw · 2012-09-19 09:42 · Score: 2
  
  If you keep increasing the voltage then it's likely that you can hit higher frequencies, but the power scales with voltage squared and frequency linearly, so power will go up pretty quickly. However, nowadays in advanced processes the interconnect is becoming more of a factor in the limitation on frequency scaling instead of the transistors themselves, in which case increasing the voltage will only help up to a certain point.
  The trade-off that the company selling the CPU's makes is between the cost of cooling, reliability and lifetime of the device (higher voltage will wear the transistors out quicker, and high temperatures accelerates this process), and yield.
Old by gcore · 2012-09-19 08:48 · Score: 4, Informative

Been running mine stable at 1Ghz for two months now. What is new, is the dynamic frequency scaling. Support for that was added like last week.
Re:Haven't touched one or an Arduino but.. by Jesse_vd · 2012-09-19 09:21 · Score: 4, Interesting

XBMC is the biggest use that comes to mind.... one of these on every TV in your house = one hell of a media center for CHEAP
10MHz Turbo-XT! by tverbeek · 2012-09-19 09:22 · Score: 2

If this "Turbo" mode is enabled by pressing a square red button on the front of the computer, I will kiss the person responsible.

--
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
Re:Haven't touched one or an Arduino but.. by Anonymous Coward · 2012-09-19 09:30 · Score: 3, Insightful

"I thought they were for basically running lego robots and turning lights on and off."
Yep, thats what an Arduino is for. Now the Pi has IO facilities to do that sort of stuff too, but its really a cheap Linux computer to encourage the Youth of today (and tomorrow) to toy about with programming on a device that encourages personal ownership due to its low cost, and the fact that its easy to program, unlike family PCs, which may not have development environments installed or may have a parental prohibition on "being fiddled with".
Yes, they might also have smartphones, tablets and so forth, but those aren't platforms that are fun to program on. The Pi is.
The speed boosts also improve the RaspPis capability as a general purpose computer for web browsing and light office applications. Its not as painful in that respect as some would have you believe, and with the ability to painlessly boost performance, make it even more worthwhile than it was before.
Re:Aww by TheGratefulNet · 2012-09-19 09:33 · Score: 3, Informative

about 10 yrs ago, maybe even 12, I had to buy a dual pentium 'compute box' for our group. I think a pentium-pro was about as good as you could get, back then. I ordered an asus board and had the whole system built by a pro builder (who did a decent job).
but this dual pentium pro was really slow! what the hell is going on?
go into the bios, poke around. what do I see? a setting called 'de-turbo mode' and its 'on' by default.
think about that. the name is a 'lower my performance' and default was 'yes, please'.
once I turned off the de-turbo mode, it ran as fast as I was expecting. very snappy system for its day.

--

--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
Where are the raspberry Pi?? by franciscohs · 2012-09-19 10:06 · Score: 2

I've been on a waiting list for at least 6 or 8 months and the last notice I had is that it was going to be shipped in about 4 months. It's ridiculous. Where does everyone get theirs?, do they even exist!?!?
1. Re:Where are the raspberry Pi?? by Ignacio · 2012-09-19 10:18 · Score: 3, Informative
  
  Cancel your order with RS and go to one of the sane companies stocking and shipping them.
Re:Aww by MarkRose · 2012-09-19 13:03 · Score: 2

12 years ago was 2000. A great x86 chip back then was a 1.4 GHz Thunderbird Athlon.
To go back to a time when the Pentium Pro was the best x86 consumer chip, you'd have to back to at least early 1996, or 18 years ago.
Yes, time does fly.

--
Be relentless!