Raspberry Pi Gets a Turbo Mode to Take it To 1GHz

Raspberry Pi has captured the minds of developers around the world. Despite the fact that it was designed for teaching kids the basics of computer science, the tiny $35 computer has found its way into the hearts of grown-up devs. Today brings good news to those who've spent their time overclocking and overvolting Raspberry Pi, warranty be damned.

The Raspberry Pi Foundation announced that the dinky computer has just been given a turbo mode that dynamically enables overclock and overvolt without affecting your warranty.

"We've been doing a lot of work to understand the impact of voltage and temperature on lifetime, and are now able to offer a 'turbo mode,' which dynamically enables overclock and overvolt under the control of a cpufreq driver, without affecting your warranty," Eben writes. "We are happy 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."

According to Eben, the author of the post on the Raspberry Pi Foundation's blog, comparing the new image with 1GHz turbo enabled, against the previous image at 700MHz, nbench reports 52 percent faster on integer, 64 percent faster on floating point and 55 percent faster on memory. Eben writes that there are five overclock presets in raspi-config, with the highest running the ARM at 1GHz. However, the level of stable overclock you'll be able to achieve will depend on your own Raspberry Pi and the PSU you're using. To that end, the Foundation recommends using Quake 3 as a stress test to check stability.

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