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."
No heatsink? (Score:2, Interesting)
Wouldn't this be more useful it they were shipping bolt on heat sinks?
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Still not enough heat. If it had a heatsink, it would go higher.
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.
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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
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Well, if the person just politely pointed it out I expect they wouldn't get banned.
But instead they labour the point, and bang on and on about it in an agressive and unhelpful manner.
Re:No heatsink? (Score:4, 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.
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Slap a heatsink on the chip you do make a difference by drawing heat off the ram that is soaked up by the processor. it makes a difference. One of those adhesive tape cheapie ram heatsinks for the DIMM modules makes a difference, small one, but the difference is there.
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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.
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if there is any contact between the packages you will get thermal conduction.
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.
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A tiny and cheap computer to aid in kids education.
Oh really, it's time this manifestly bogus myth was put to rest. If you want to educate children about programming you simply load an app onto the PCs that are everywhere in schools. You don't create a brand new little computer that needs an HD-TV to display AND extra an keyboard and mouse before it can do anything.
If the intended audience really was the poor and the underprivileged (even in "rich" countries) the additional hardware needed to use Pis in any meaningful number requires a school to make an en
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Well, if you want to educate people in low level programming it helps a lot if you have a common platform with a pre-configured tool chain to start out with. You aren't necessarily _done_ teaching kids to program when they have mastered Python.
And just for Python programming I think that it helps to have pre-configured environment on identical hardware too. I don't think hardware is the greatest challenge for most schools/individuals that want to teach programming, but rather setting up and maintaining a de
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If you are getting into the more advanced programing, why would you cripple your students by confining them to such a limited platform?
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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 ent
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You can heatsink them. The question is, would it do any good? The answer is; yes, probably. The thermal conductivity between the memory and cpu die should be pretty good. As a comparison, I worked at a company that made some modules that consisted of a memory IC and some other devices, all contained within an epoxy-filled module. I ran some ja and jc tests, thinking that the epoxy would act as an insulator and increase the values over the memory IC by itself. It turned out that the numbers were lower. The e
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look at the side view.
its a chip, then balls of solder, then another chip. HUGE air gap and not even a heatsink join between them. just solder balls, which are not meant to conduct heat, really.
you get heat rising from the cpu, below, thru the air and to the top ram chip. but that's VERY indirect cooling.
I'd take a WAG and think that you get 10% improvement in cooling via an 'upper decker' heatsink. the ram will be cooler but we don't care about the ram as much.
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I can't seem to find a picture, but if there is a "huge air gap" then you should be able to get away with filling that gap with non electrically conductive thermal grease to assist moving the heat. Then cool the memory chip and/or cap it so that you can fill the void completely and allow direct heat-sink to grease contact along the edges.
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The point is, the solder balls actually are a really good conductor of heat, as are the interconnects that they join. You can't change the basic thermal properties of a material just because you are not intending to use those properties. Just because our first intuition is that the air gap is going to drive the overall thermal conductivity of the package doesn't make it so. Just like I, along with others, thought that the epoxy in the modules I worked with would act more as an insulator rather than the pret
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Doubt it. At a guess, the thermal conductivity to the PCB itself is probably going to be much better than the thermal conductivity up through the top of the package and through the RAM chip, possibly so much so that adding a heatsink to the top of the chip stack would make essentially no difference.
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what a stupid design.
It's a cellphone processor. It needs to be small. That's how you get them small.
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Too bad you cant cement one on yourself. Damn them and their anti-heatsink technology!
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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.
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its called 'frustration-inherent technology'.
ie, when users hear about this, they'll have a FIT.
Re:No heatsink? (Score:5, Funny)
They call it "package on package".
Would Google for specs, but afraid of getting gay porn by mistake...
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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
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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?)
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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 cooli
Old (Score:4, Informative)
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Anyone fried theirs yet?
Now with free heater app.. (Score:1)
Aww (Score:1)
Makes me miss my 'Turbo' button on my 486...
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The "turbo" button wasn't really turbo... it was either normal speed, or 1/2 clock speed, or otherwise crippling the cache or something to slow it down.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turbo_button [wikipedia.org]
Re:Aww (Score:4, 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.
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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.
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I never could figure-out what that 486 Turbo button was for. I didn't notice any difference in speed.
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The turbo mode was generally intended to be used if you didn't want the faster speed, e.g. when running programs that depended upon the cpu to be running at the IBM "standard" frequency and had hard-coded loops for timing control. Running a faster cpu frequency could make those programs unusable.
If you didn't notice any difference in speed on your machine, it could be that some bios setting was overriding the turbo button setting.
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And if the button wasn't working, it probably wasn't plugged into anything.
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my old computer used to have a turbo button. it didn't seem to do anything, but every few days, I'd flip it on and off just for the heck of it.
a few weeks later, I got an email from a lady in holland. she said 'cut it out!'
(shamelessly stolen/adapted from steven wright)
Haven't touched one or an Arduino but.. (Score:1)
Re:Haven't touched one or an Arduino but.. (Score:5, 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
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Sometimes they really screw up, I got a $340 NIB AMD C60 netbook with Win7 64 bit for the same price as a 3 year old single core Atom. I then crammed an 8gb stick of ram in it, max "supported" was 4 g
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Otherwise, TVs already come with a network port and integrated media player.
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I'm trying to do the exact same thing - I bought a big monitor to connect to my laptop for working from home. The rest of it's life it's just in the way, so I figured it could just run XBMC. So far, no particular joy though - you need a fast SD card to make it workable, and my particular one isn't supported by the raspbmc project yet (although it is supported by the Pi itself). On a slower card, it's just awful to use.
The Pi really is a great little gadget - and for £30 quid, you can have a dozen of t
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You really can't think of anything that's heavyweight for a general purpose CPU to do? It can do whatever you want it to do. It has an onboard graphics accelerator. Think computer vision, a fancy control scheme, etc. Let me guess, you sit at a console all day doing server side stuffs. :P
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"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
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Hand-me-down computers today will completely curb stomp a pi and there is vast quantities of software and software development tools for windows, or even linux, for those who are interested. People who want to "toy about" with programing won't give the pi a second thought because it is simply too slow and too restrictive.
It will be used by serious tinkerers, for high le
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Compling Quake 3... ;)
Playing Q3 I've not yet attempted as it not currently connected to a TV.
10MHz Turbo-XT! (Score:3)
If this "Turbo" mode is enabled by pressing a square red button on the front of the computer, [codinghorror.com] I will kiss the person responsible.
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That's what turning Turbo mode "off" was for.
This be unstable as a skiff at high sea in a storm (Score:2)
it's from the manufacturer (Score:2)
presumably they know what the chip can handle
Where are the raspberry Pi?? (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!?!?
Re:Where are the raspberry Pi?? (Score:4, Informative)
Cancel your order with RS and go to one of the sane companies stocking and shipping them.
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I agree with Ignacio; cancel your order with RS and go through Farnell. They have a clue and they ship product fast. In the U.S. I had mine within a week with expedited shipping.
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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!?!?
I have the exact same problem. Maybe I'll try and get my money back and order from one of these other companies who are supposedly shipping real devices.
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I was allowed to order (and pay for) mine in June, after the initial bait-and-switch and then a shipping hike of more than the cost of the board itself. I finally got an order number in the low 80 thousands with a nine week shipping estimate.
Still no shipping notification, and no more updates on where they're up to in the list.
Yet, the people claiming to be in charge of this train wreck are giving boards away as prizes. Unbelievable.
switch distributors (Score:2)
Seriously, cancel and order from the other guy. In Canada Newark has them in stock and Allied is saying many weeks delay.
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Cancel your order with RS and order it from Farnell (element 14). Farnell are currently shipping in 2 days I hear. RS have made some huge balls up it seems.
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I was at Farnell's trade counter just the other day. I could have bought one there and then! RS has been dreadful with their deliveries.
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Bring on the LN2! (Score:2)
If you cool the memory package to sub-zero the CPU will probably cooled quite well.
Where is it? (Score:1)
I wish they'd just send my backorderd one before telling me all the features I'll never see.
Overclocking Raspberry Pi (Score:2)
Does this mean that the Raspberry Pi can bake itself?