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The Raspberry Pi Linux computer was already a superior value priced at US-$25 to $35. Eben Upton, the founder of the non-profit Raspberry Pi Foundation, has managed to turn up the sizzle to deliver more value than many would have expected.Previously the technique of overvolting a unit would have voided the warranty. The foundation has completed additional testing and development and now offers a Raspberry Pi turbo mode which enables both overclocking and overvolting dynamically under control of an approved cpufreq driver; and it does it without voiding the warranty. Pi owners should be advised that overvolting the unit by other methods can be detected by the foundation and does void the warranty.
Cutting to the Chase
The result is nbench scores that report speed improvements of 55% faster on memory, 52% faster on integer, and 64% faster on floating point calculations.
Doing It Safely
Upton said in a post on the RaspberryPi.org site that: "....the combination of only applying turbo when busy, and limiting turbo when the BCM2835′s internal temperature reaches 85°C, means there will be no measurable reduction in the lifetime of your Raspberry Pi."
The new driver allows users to choose any of five overclock presets using raspi-config. The highest setting pushes the ARM from the stock 700MHz all the way up to 1GHz. Also provided is a core temperature widget to show how close a unit is to the 85°C limiter, and a cpufreq widget that will indicate the current ARM frequency.
Additional Tasty Pi Goodies
- Analogue audio quality is improved
- WiFi is now supported right out of the box
- PenguinsPuzzle & SmartSim are pre-installed
- Additional software is installed by default
- Gordon’s “FIQ Fix” is enabled in the USB driver, reducing the USB interrupt rate, while improving overall performance by approximately 10%
