There are many projects that we see every day that use a Raspberry Pi as the central axis to create a new device, but we often forget about those that want to see how far its power really goes. Now we know, thanks to an enthusiast of these boards, how far the integrated CPU they have is capable of going, and that a user has managed to make a overclock to significantly increase the GHz who offers the clock of the Raspberry pie.
Do a overclock manually is usually not a simple task, and if we also add that it is a very different platform from the one we are used to, the problem becomes much more complicated. But even so, there are always people who manage to do things that seem impossible, and in this case Jeff Geerling managed to force the chip that integrates the Raspberry pie to make sure that his CPU works above 3 GHzprobably becoming one of the first people to achieve this.
Raspberry Pi can also be overclocked to improve performance
It is increasingly common to see many people teaming up to try to find the limits of a component, and that is that the overclock It is a practice that can be found practically everywhere. What we probably did not expect is to see how a person manages to apply it on a Raspberry Pi, since generally all projects related to this type of boards with integrated components usually involve creating a completely new device taking advantage of the advantages it offers. . compared to other types of computers.
Although it is clear that completing a task is not an easy task overclock, and even less taking into account that in order to operate a processor of this specific model at a higher frequency, the user who took this step had to make changes to the firmware, use various cooling methods and, according to Jeff himself, have a lot of luck.
From the beginning, the person who made the overclock He claims that he is not an expert in this field, but he has a series of knowledge that many people do not have, because in order for the Raspberry itself to exceed 3 GHz, it was necessary to modify the voltage limit of the device. firmware. This year, during Pi Day, the user managed to port a Raspberry Pi 5 until the 3.14 GHzbut now, thanks to new firmware and various fixes, it has managed to unlock much higher frequencies.
But that’s not all that led the user to achieve this, since as stated, luck is one more factor that managed to allow a overclock In this way, Jeff describes this fact as something very important, since the model he used is “the perfect device”, that is, a Raspberry with the best factory components. In this case, he places a lot of emphasis on what he calls the “silicon lottery”, which implies that when manufacturing the wafers there are hundreds of chips, and many of them have small imperfections.
In this case, Jeff specifies that the chip he integrates into the model is a “golden sample”, that is, the card does not have any type of defect and can really show what it is capable of offering. This, added to the modifications made to the firmware and the cooling designed specifically for this case, is what led it to reach 3.4 GHz, as well as scores of 1,121 points in the Geekbench 6 single-core test, as well as a multi-core score. of 2219.
