Raspberry Pi gets a Turbo Boost
The kind folks over at Raspberry Pi have released a new version of Raspbian “Wheezy”. This includes support for a turbo boost that does not affect the warranty and dynamically tweaks the clock and voltage via a cpufreq driver.
The turbo boost settings can be configured by running “sudo raspi-config” or by editing the file /boot/config.txt
As an added bonus, the new image includes the following new features:
- Temperature and Frequency Widgets.
- Improvements to USB performance by reducing the USB interrupt rate.
- WiFi dongles using the RTL8188CUS chipsets are now supported out of the box.
- Improved analogue audio.
- Extra software – SmartSim and PenguinsPuzzle are pre-installed.
Follow this link for more information: http://www.raspberrypi.org/archives/2008
Update: 20/09/20012
I’ve run the benchmark I previously wrote about in this blog post and this one and the results are frankly astonishing:
As an aid memoir, Wheezy (15/07) improved upon Squeeze by adding hardware floating point support.
As you can see, the claims that performance is up by about 50% is about right; compile time for my application is about twice as fast as the original Debian release when the Pi is running at full whack. Even more graphically intensive applications benefit; the run time for the app, including rendering, is about 35% faster, which ain’t too shabby for a software update.