Raspberry Pi Hits 1GHz With Official 'Turbo Mode' 92
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."
Ah, to be young again... (Score:4, 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?)
Re:No heatsink? (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.
Re:No heatsink? (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.
Re:Haven't touched one or an Arduino but.. (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.