[HN Gopher] Beating Jeff's 3.14 Ghz Raspberry Pi 5
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Beating Jeff's 3.14 Ghz Raspberry Pi 5
Author : jonatron
Score : 210 points
Date : 2024-05-19 21:02 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (jonatron.github.io)
(TXT) w3m dump (jonatron.github.io)
| dustfinger wrote:
| Assuming a fast reliable internet connection, how well does an
| overclocked raspberry pi 5 perform when video conferencing using
| popular conferencing applications such as zoom, google meet, ms
| teams and the like?
| godzillabrennus wrote:
| Probably slightly worse than a 10 year old core i7 cpu
| computer.
| matt-p wrote:
| True, to some extent this is also an artefact of
| (comparatively) poor software optimisation for pi. In this
| case almost certainly zoom and others apps will be using cpu
| encoding/decoding rather than offloading.
| FrostKiwi wrote:
| Exacerbated by the Raspberry Pi 5 having lost all Hardware
| Video Encoding and H.264 Video Decoding. (That logic I
| don't follow at all)
| callalex wrote:
| The cartel charges pretty high fees for those.
| justin66 wrote:
| Teams works fine, so I suspect the others do as well.
| bdavbdav wrote:
| For that kind of thing, you're 100x better off getting an old
| enterprise uSFF workstation on the cheap. Whenever I can, I
| reach for a used Dell 5070 or similar if I don't need GPIO.
| They eBay for about PS40-50, have real NVME, x86, and the
| pentium ones are pretty powerful.
| geerlingguy wrote:
| Awesome work, and I'm glad you could post some results! I'm
| hoping to get time to delid one, put on a peltier cooler, and try
| to control the temperature a little better for a run to see how
| high it'll go before either burning up or going unstable.
|
| From my testing on clocks on the Pi 5, it looks like the default
| clock of 2.4 GHz is pretty close to the sweet spot for this chip
| (BCM2712), and you burn a lot of power for small incremental
| gains after that[1]. (Which you seem to also show with the 3.3
| GHz overclock!).
|
| I also spoke to one of the Pi engineers about the chip behavior
| at higher clocks, and he suggested unlike some chips, this chip
| might run more stably at higher temperatures (like 50-60degC)
| rather than 'as cold as you can get it'. So that poses some
| challenges since most cooling solutions aren't tuned for 'keep a
| temperature' but instead 'get it as cold as possible', without a
| lot of manual tweaking.
|
| [1] https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2023/overclocking-and-
| unde...
| metadat wrote:
| Did the engineer explain why the higher temps contribute to
| stability? I've not heard of such a phenomenon before.
| geerlingguy wrote:
| No physics-level explanation, just that they found the chips
| to be more stable in testing when they were a little warmer
| vs a little colder. The key was to keep them around that
| temperature, though, which still requires a good amount of
| cooling the more voltage that runs through it!
|
| Just... he mentioned I might not have as much success using
| LN2 or something more exotic, compared to standard water or
| Peltier cooling.
| metadat wrote:
| That's pretty crazy, thanks for sharing, Jeff.
|
| Overclocking was my bread and butter as a [relatively]
| broke teenager in the late nineties, around the era of the
| first Athlon Thunderbirds, when you could take a 1GHz chip
| and [maybe] OC it to 1.5Ghz. It was a great time to be
| alive, and yet this is the first case I've heard of where
| LN2 would not give you a dramatically better result 99.99%+
| of the time! I still miss HardOCP and Kyle Bennett and his
| team's reviews.
|
| That one t-bird with char spots... It still worked reliably
| somehow, I might even have it in a box somewhere. Those
| swirly finned CPU coolers were shit! I came home every day
| after school and volted/burned the hell out of that poor
| chip, not realizing what I was doing.. lol.
| K0balt wrote:
| I still remember my dual celeron 450 clocked to 900 mhz.
| Those chips ran rock solid at double their rated clock,
| no didling the voltage or anything. Just needed decent
| cooling. Never mind that at the time having 2 processors
| was nearly useless.
| geerlingguy wrote:
| Heh, back in those days decent cooling was a lot easier
| than now (for overclocking, at least).
|
| That's one nice thing working on these little mobile
| chips--I don't need a $300 cooler, I can use a cheap
| little water block, or a small peltier element that
| doesn't cost much at all... and it's not being a space
| heater for the room. It's only pulling maybe 10-20W max.
| metadat wrote:
| Where are these "cheap" water blocks you speak of? Haha,
| I've never encountered such a thing.
|
| Except maybe the $100 Corsair liquid coolers, but c'mon,
| they aren't real water cooling
| riedel wrote:
| I still remember that time, when you actually waited for
| the low end chip to be released and get it as fast as the
| earlier released flagships. Was a different time. But I
| also roughly remember having a dual socket board at the
| time with two overclocked celerons if my mind does not
| fool me. Funnily my wife is still using this 25 year old
| PC case, in which I glued bitumen for sound damping, for
| her current ryzen based PC.
| MattPalmer1086 wrote:
| Haha, yes, back in the 90s I had a dual Gigabyte
| motherboard and two 300Mhz Celerons overclocked to 450.
| Helped a lot with 3d animation and video rendering, but
| not much else!
| bayindirh wrote:
| I have overclocked a 1433MHz Athlon 1700+ (TBred/B IIRC)
| to 2200 MHz (3200+ levels) with an AN7-Ultra.
|
| The secret sauce was running it at 200x11, with 1T
| capable RAMs, and that thing was snappier than "bog
| standard" 3200+ systems a considerable amount.
|
| Without much of a voltage bump, and a good cooling
| solution, it ran within its thermal design without noise,
| and with rock solid stability. That system lived more
| than 15 years IIRC.
| seanp2k2 wrote:
| My favorite OCs were a $250 Black Friday special Celeron
| laptop that I pin-modded using a few-mm long piece of a
| single strand of stranded cat5 to go from (IIRC) 1.5Ghz
| to 2.0Ghz by just shorting two pins on the socket under
| the CPU, and a 4.6ghz (3.3-3.7ghz stock) Sandy Bridge
| i5-2500k that was rock-solid on air cooling with a
| comically large (especially at the time) tower cooler.
| That latter desktop ran the heck out of Team Fortress 2
| (which I still play at least once a week with one of the
| last remaining community servers, End of the Line Gaming)
| for many many years.
| toast0 wrote:
| > I still miss HardOCP and Kyle Bennett and his team's
| reviews.
|
| Kyle stil posts on Hardforum, and much of the team went
| on to https://www.thefpsreview.com/ but it's not really
| the same, because there's no 50% overclocking by just
| moving a jumper. CPUs and GPUs get factory overclocking
| that's probably within 10% of what you can get with
| reasonable efforts.
| stavros wrote:
| If it comes like that from the factory, is it _over_
| clocking? Isn't it just clocking?
| viciousvoxel wrote:
| potato, overpotato
| seanp2k2 wrote:
| We live in the age of dynamic clocks where modern
| performance-oriented CPUs try to optimize both
| performance and power efficiency at all times, so for the
| vast majority of users, it's both a lot faster _and_ a
| lot more efficient to do things this way, while
| enthusiast parts still allow a lot of manual control to
| squeeze out the last few percent. I 've had really good
| luck in my past few builds just getting very high-spec
| RAM and running XMP / DOCP profiles with a small FSB OC
| and letting the multipliers do the rest.
| jonatron wrote:
| I have extensive experience in watching LTT's jank cooling
| videos, and I think water cooling with a big relatively big
| reservoir would be able to keep the temperature at a chosen
| temperature. I found someone who has done it:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iBNSbzTzfSE&t=20s using
| this kit: https://www.seeedstudio.com/High-Performance-
| Liquid-Cooler-f...
| nsteel wrote:
| The temperature inversion effect is more pronounced at 16nm
| (Pi 5) than older nodes. This results in high VT cells
| performing better when warmer, the opposite of what we are
| used to. At the "normal" operating conditions (temp and
| frequency), this shouldn't be noticeable but when your at
| the absolute frequency limit it's not ideal for your
| critical path (where you normally use HVT cells) to get any
| slower. Perhaps it's related to this.
| ZiiS wrote:
| Wonder if it was more to do with deltas. Everything at
| 50deg might be more stable then hotspots?
| c0balt wrote:
| This might be naive but you may take a look at warm water
| cooling from HPC/ Hyper Scalers. Combined with a custom block
| this should stay stable at the 50-60deg sweet spot.
| fl0ki wrote:
| > but instead 'get it as cold as possible'
|
| More like 'get it as ambient as possible' so if you're in a 50
| degree room you're all set.
| trvz wrote:
| You've mixed up Celsius and Fahrenheit.
| mrlonglong wrote:
| I'd love to see a 16GB variant of the RPi5 some day.
| Havoc wrote:
| If you don't need the pi software ecosystem the orange pi 5
| plus competitor comes in 32gb
| jonatron wrote:
| Just quickly looking at Orange Pi 5 images without properly
| researching, the official site links to images on google
| drive, and armbian has an image with a 5.10 kernel, that
| requires PPA's for 3D acceleration.
|
| There's got to be an SBC other than Raspberry Pi that has
| reasonable software support. Does anyone know? I'm not buying
| another SBC that advertises hardware video decoding but
| doesn't actually have the software for it, or requires one
| specific modified kernel version.
| nyanmisaka wrote:
| RPi OS is also using a modified kernel and packages that
| include the v4l2 codec and FFmpeg (rpi-ffmpeg, which I ever
| tested). https://github.com/raspberrypi/linux/commit/46f21c
| ab3e888823... https://github.com/jc-kynesim/rpi-ffmpeg
|
| These staging drivers do not exist in the Linux mainline.
| It means that you will not get hardware acceleration
| support when compiling and installing the kernel from
| `torvalds/linux` instead of `raspberrypi/linux`.
|
| As for the RK3588 SBCs, you are free to choose to use Linux
| 5.10 LTS (legacy) or 6.1 LTS kernel, both of which are
| officially supported by Rockchip. Or alternatively, use the
| bleed edge kernel 6.9. Official 3D acceleration will be
| available in Mesa 24.1 and Linux 6.10, and the developers
| have also backported it to 6.1 LTS for ease of use.
|
| In addition to Armbian, you can also use `ubuntu-rockchip`,
| which has full hardware-accelerated desktop/server Ubuntu
| 22.04/24.04 LTS support. https://github.com/Joshua-
| Riek/ubuntu-rockchip
|
| The VPU used by video decoding has nothing to do with
| 3D/GPU. With `ffmpeg-rockchip` and `libv4l-rkmpp` you get
| 4k@60 hw decoding support in Chromium and MPV player, and
| 8k@60 hw decoding support in Kodi.
| https://github.com/nyanmisaka/ffmpeg-
| rockchip/wiki/Rendering
|
| Jellyfin also provides complete transcoding pipeline
| support on the RK3588 based SBCs.
| https://jellyfin.org/docs/general/administration/hardware-
| ac...
| jonatron wrote:
| Thanks, this is really useful information.
| fl0ki wrote:
| Is there a consensus on the best available cooler for the Pi 5? I
| looked at this exact unit but wanted more of a "case" design.
|
| I first tried the Flirc passive case. It seems to transport and
| dissipate heat notably better than active coolers with copper
| heatsinks and 4000 RPM fans. That's especially impressive given
| that the entire top and bottom are plastic, leaving the
| horizontal edge as the only surface for heat dissipation.
|
| My remaining concern there is that it only cools the Broadcom
| SoC, while creating a nice little insulated oven for the other
| chips. The inner surface area is much greater than the outer
| surface area, and with no ventilation by design, so heat from the
| SoC is being distributed throughout the whole inner volume.
|
| I also tried an active cooler to avoid that, which I'm sure is
| better for every other chip but I'm surprised to find was
| substantially worse for the SoC itself. I guess the tiny copper
| block gets saturated very quickly and its surface area isn't very
| large for air cooling.
|
| Maybe that's why the monoblock passive coolers do so well, in
| theory they combine the best of these approaches. I just wish
| they'd apply the same idea to a refined "case" design like the
| Flirc.
| LeoPanthera wrote:
| I also use the flirc cases and have been similarly concerned by
| the other components getting hot, but I must admit that it
| doesn't seem to cause any actual problems, at least not yet,
| and it certainly does a good job of keeping the CPU cool.
| rolobio wrote:
| I have always found coolers with heat pipes provide the best
| cooling for mine.
| wpm wrote:
| if you don't need the pi to stack I've found the Argon One to
| be a good case for both overclocked 4's and 5's. The fan is
| somewhat weedy and the airflow is questionable, but the entire
| case acts as a heatsink. As far as thermal mass goes I don't
| know of any that beat it.
|
| And additionally, you get a Pi case that puts all the ports on
| one edge where they belong instead of forcing you to make cable
| squids on your workbench/desk.
| nsteel wrote:
| The bigger the better, right? If so, this:
| https://thepihut.com/products/ice-tower-plus-for-raspberry-p...
| mbesto wrote:
| > There's a silicon lottery
|
| Isn't there also an environmental factor that hasn't been fully
| explore? Are we sure there isn't an alternative to the cooling
| mechanism on the CPU than the two options the parent and Jeff
| used?
| 486sx33 wrote:
| Don't know anything about arm or pi cooling But on my ryzen 9,
| a big ass air cooler beats liquid cooling by miles.
| zamadatix wrote:
| Liquid cooling itself doesn't really cool anything, it's
| actually all about being able to move heat around so you can
| have an absolutely insane amount of radiator because it
| doesn't have to fit in the space around the CPU. If your
| radiator isn't enormous (i.e. at least 360mm, if not larger),
| is too thin, or is itself not getting proper airflow to
| actually dissipate the energy then it's probably not doing
| much better than a large air cooler could do. Well the other
| thing liquid loops add is they give a larger thermal mass
| (i.e. takes a lot longer to heat up and can absorb bursts
| better) but that doesn't really matter 2 hours in.
|
| Also a 7950X owner :). It's been a good CPU outside the
| memory controller is a bit weak compared to the Intel
| counterparts, will be interesting to see what the two release
| this year.
| hinkley wrote:
| How much voltage noise can get from a PSU to the cpu these
| days? I wonder if a better one lets you get closer to the
| theoretical limit.
| KennyBlanken wrote:
| Semi-related, but TIL the Raspberry Pi Foundation enabling large
| corporate customers to secure-boot lock the Pis they're embedding
| in their juice dispensers and whatnot.
|
| Nothing like being a supposed open source darling and helping
| corporations deny people the right to use hardware they purchase,
| the way they want to - and helping contribute to e-waste, because
| there will be millions of Pis that nobody can use for anything
| other than the IoT banana dispenser they were integrated into...
| jonatron wrote:
| I'm not sure Raspberry Pi are to blame. Broadcom insist on
| closed source binary blobs, and their chip has e-fuses built
| in.
| regularfry wrote:
| I think it is reasonable to criticise them for being quite so
| tightly tied to Broadcom, though. That's an artefact of the
| local ecosystem they're in, and it's arguable that the pi
| wouldn't exist at the price point it does without such a
| close tie, but live by the sword, die by the sword...
| im3w1l wrote:
| There are legitimate reasons for such a thing though, I think.
| Like I don't _want_ my juice dispenser to do general purpose
| computation. I don 't want it to be capable of web surfing.
|
| Ideally you would do that by building it out of simple
| mechanical components, but if taking smart components and
| dumbing them down is cheaper then that sounds fine too.
| nsteel wrote:
| > Nothing like being a supposed open source darling
|
| They've never claimed to be an open-source company. It's unfair
| to judge a company (or charity) against your own ideas of what
| they stand for. Some of their software is open source and some
| is not. Some of their hardware is open (2040), most is not.
| benatkin wrote:
| Another thing that won't be matched by Tau Day.
| whalesalad wrote:
| pi's feel like the perfect candidate for submerged liquid
| cooling. imagining a tiny little french fry basket filled with
| pi's being lowered into some mineral oil and bubblin. salt to
| taste.
| elliottkember wrote:
| raspberry fri
| MuffinFlavored wrote:
| > A single mov.cc instruction can be patched to remove the
| voltage limit. However, it's in bootmain, which is signed, so we
| can't just patch bootmain and flash the eeprom. > > However, as a
| root linux user on Raspberry Pi full access to system memory,
| including memory used by the videocore. I mmap'd /dev/vc-mem,
| searched for the instruction and replaced it, but i'll leave that
| as an exercise to the reader. I don't want people blaming me if
| their Pi decides to halt and catch fire.
|
| Does this need to be reapplied every time at boot? Guessing
| yes...
| jonatron wrote:
| Yes. Maybe it's theoretically possible to add something to a
| modifiable part of the eeprom, but that's beyond what I can do
| in my spare time.
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