No More Burnt Raspberry Pi: Safe Supercharging for Super-Small PC

Yes, the $35 credit card-sized computer-on-a-chip Raspberry Pi is cheap and awesome. But it's not that powerful. Whether you're building an aerial drone or a supercomputer, you might want a bit more power under the hood. With this in mind, the organization behind the Raspberry Pi will now let you "turbocharge" the device, cranking it from the standard 700 MHz processor clock speed to as much as 1GHz -- without voiding your warranty.
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Yes, the $35 credit card-sized computer-on-a-chip Raspberry Pi is cheap and awesome. But it's not that powerful. Whether you're building an aerial drone or a supercomputer, you might want a bit more power under the hood.

With this in mind, the organization behind the Raspberry Pi will now let you "turbocharge" the device, cranking it from the standard 700 MHz processor clock speed to as much as 1GHz -- without voiding your warranty.

The new "Turbo Mode" is available in the latest version of Raspberry Pi's custom Linux distribution, Raspbian. The Raspberry Pi blog has instructions for upgrading.

Turbo Mode relies on a technique called overclocking. Processor speeds aren't just limited by hardware. They're also limited by an internal "clock" that controls how quickly calculations are done. A chip's rating -- 700 MHz in the case of the ARM chip that powers the Raspberry Pi -- is the rate that the manufacturer has deemed optimal. Changing the clock speeds enables you to speed up your processor at the risk of decreased stability.

Raspberry Pi has always allowed you to increase your clock speed without voiding the warranty just by editing a text file in Raspbian. But there's another method that enables overclockers to go further: overvolting.

Overvolting is just what it sounds like -- an increase of voltage to components. But the downside to overvolting is that it can damage hardware and/or reduce its lifetime -- hence the voiding of warranties.

To pull off overvolting without significantly reducing the lifetime of the device, the Raspberry Pi team designed the Turbo Mode system so that overvolting is only applied when the system is actually busy enough to need the boost, and cuts off when temperatures reach 85°C.

Turbo Mode includes 5 presets, the fastest of which will run at 1GHz. But there's more to the boost than just the increase in speed to the ARM processor. In Turbo Mode, the graphical processing unit (GPU) is increased as well.

Simon Cox, the University of Southampton scientist who leads the Raspberry Pi supercomputer project, told us previously that exploiting the computing power of the GPU may have more potential than relying on the ARM chip. But that potential is only just starting to be explored.