21 ms·

New Raspberry Pi 4 Firmware Lowers Temperature by 3-5°C

299 points by close04 7y ago

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
saagarjha 7y ago
> I did not understand VLI at first, but eventually understand this referred to the firmware for VIA VL805 PCIe USB 3.0 controller on the board. Possibly a stupid question: what does “VLI” stand for?
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- fwip 7y ago
  After some googling, it looks like VLI is the manufacturer that produced the USB controller chip [1] for the Raspberry Pi, so I guess that VLI firmware is the firmware that they provided for their chip. [1] https://www.via-labs.com/product_show.php?id=48 https://www.via-labs.com/product_show.php?id=48
  - Stratoscope 7y ago
    An amusing side note (or maybe I'm easily amused): A couple of years ago I bought a USB-C drive enclosure, and when I use the Windows "safe removal" menu it shows up as "VLI Product String". Yes, the case manufacturer didn't bother changing the string in the sample VLI firmware!
userbinator 7y ago
New USB controller firmware, apparently. The fact that it can have any effect on the CPU temperature is a little puzzling. I work in a office where the air conditioner is set to 28°C Wow. As someone who is used to a room temperature of 20C, 28C is above the point of idle sweating and becoming lethargic. While that's still within the range that most consumer electronics are rated for, I believe a room temperature of 20C is the normal design target.
- rtpg 7y ago
  I know this is now totally unrelated to raspi but where do you live? Setting your AC to 20C seems freezing to me and I almost never set my AC below 26C (Tokyo)
  - losteric 7y ago
    I think it's an American thing. My workplace (Seattle) keeps the AC set around 72F (22C). In the summer, I walk to work in a t-shirt around 7AM, then put on a thin hoodie at work... Feels weird to me, but college and people's homes are usually set to mid-70F too (or ambient temperature).
    - atoav 7y ago
      I hate this — yet it is very typical in southern European nations too. The way I see it you always long for what you don’t have. That is why in torching hot places they tend to cool things really down and wear long pants and a second layer, while in northern nations people will run around in shorts and thin dresses literally the first time it seems to be a little bit summerish. I think that big of a temperature difference is not only a tremendous waste of energy (that heats the rest of the outside at the same time), but it is also quite impractical: you always have to carry around a second layer if you are planing to stay somwhere for more than an hour. There you are, carrying around that hoodie, just because the rooms are cooled down to much.
  - darkpuma 7y ago
    In the US, 20-24C is a pretty typical AC setting, with commercial buildings usually closer to the cool end. I don't put on a jacket (other than for fashion) until 15C or so. For me, 26C would negatively impact my productivity.
    - kjar 7y ago
      In my experience for reasons unknown to me men run hotter than women leading to endless battles at the thermostat
Arbalest 7y ago
When we say firmware, are we talking about a binary blob? Can it be replaced if we're willing to take an efficiency hit?
- sneak 7y ago
  The RPi has several proprietary binary blobs required for it to function, and always has. This has been one of my long-standing gripes about the platform’s security.
  - gjsman-1000 7y ago
    Unfortunately, there are no boards on the market (that I know of) that don't have any closed-source blobs. Also (unfortunately) it is probably going to stay this way because of legal requirements. 1) Broadcom has quite a bit of stuff they want hidden and don't allow any of their many customers (including the Pi) to open-source. 2) The Pi 4's SoC has a hardware H.264 block and hardware H.265 block. Older Pi's had a hardware MPEG-2, hardware VC-1, and hardware H.264 block. These blocks require royalties and are _heavily_ protected by MPEG LA. If open-source software was released that could control these blocks, you could possibly expect a huge lawsuit against the Raspberry Pi Trading arm. 3) To the Pi's benefit, the VideoCore is not open-source but is the most openly-documented GPU available in a mobile device. Most Pi competitors use Mali, which if you look at Hackaday's Pine64 Un-Review, works with almost nothing and has wretched documentation. There is some open-source work, but quite a bit remains closed or completely inoperable on Linux. 4) If you need platform security, look elsewhere. The Pi doesn't support secure boot, licensed code signing requirements, and the new Pi 4 allows almost anyone to update the USB and SoC EEPROMs just by putting in a new SD card and running a few commands. 5) Cortex-A72 on Pi 4 is venerable to Spectre.
    - xeeeeeeeeeeenu 7y ago
      >These blocks require royalties and are _heavily_ protected by MPEG LA. If open-source software was released that could control these blocks, you could possibly expect a huge lawsuit against the Raspberry Pi Trading arm. I think you're confusing copyright and patents. Just because some technology is patented, it doesn't mean it can't be open sourced.
sneak 7y ago
The fact that the RPi has writable onboard state/storage of any kind whatsoever (save for the fuses which are WORM) comes as news to me. The SoC firmware is loaded from the FAT partition on the SD card, so there is no “flashing” (in the traditional EEPROM sense) of the system firmware. Apparently the USB chip has its own EEPROM?
- cesarb 7y ago
  To make things worse, AFAIK the USB chip is connected through PCIe, so unless the RPi has an IOMMU, it could in theory DMA to anywhere in the host memory.
  - gjsman-1000 7y ago
    I don't know the details, but the memory controller is twice as fast for the SD card than the old Pi's are, and SOMETHING (I'm not sure for certain what, don't quote me) did change with the memory subsystem. This change is what allowed a workaround which allowed for 4GB of RAM for the first time (whereas before, the 1GB of RAM was a limitation throughout the SoC). So, it _may_ have a lite-IOMMU, but I'd open a forum posting for more info. Edit: This could also be why the SoC uses an EEPROM. The RPF said that booting the Pi4 with this new memory system is _much_ more complicated than booting a Pi3, and that permanently burning the boot code into the SoC (like on the Pi3 and earlier) was not an option for the Pi4. Extremely high risk of backfiring.
    - makomk 7y ago
      As far as I know, the SoC supported higher SD card speeds all the way back to the first Pi and the original drivers even tried to use them. The trouble is, the older Pis couldn't switch to the lower IO voltages required to actually operate at those speeds. Early adopters actually had to track down older, slower SD cards in order to use their Pis because otherwise SD card access would fail due to the driver erroneously switching speeds.
      - gjsman-1000 7y ago
feedbeef 7y ago
Sadly, I can’t measure [power consumption] as my power meter is dead. Would be nice to see those measurements, as RPi 4's idle consumption (initial reports of ~3 watts) is quite poor compared to RPi 2B and 3B's ~1 watt.
- close04 7y ago
  From what I've read it consumes 1W extra over the 3B+. But it's understandable given that everything that could be upgraded was upgraded. Far more powerful CPU, USB/Eth, and possibly 3GB of extra RAM.
hendry 7y ago
High temperatures and other Rpi4 issues are covered by Andreas Spiess in https://youtu.be/0diTHAmVbhc https://youtu.be/0diTHAmVbhc
- gloflo 7y ago
  In what way? Any interesting or just stating the same facts that a 15 line paragraph could cover?
nielsole 7y ago
I just tried out the Pi 4 yesterday and after a couple of hours of headless idling with no peripherals connected (just wifi) it was so hot, I almost burned my finger. So this is definitely welcomed. But heatsinks or even fans will likely be necessary to do anything with the pi 4
- penagwin 7y ago
  I don't have a pi 4 to play with, but is there any chance you could try one of the mini heatsinks that just adhere onto the cpu, without any active cooling? I'm just curious to see if that helps much, they're pretty cheap and could be useful other places too (I use one on the VTX for my drone) You can check the temperature though the pi itself. From my experience depending on the material/length of contact, things start to get too hot to comfortably hold after ~55C/60C for most metals, but brief contact might barely feel warm. [0] https://www.amazon.com/Easycargo-Raspberry-Heatsink-Aluminum-conductive/dp/B07217N5LS/ https://www.amazon.com/Easycargo-Raspberry-Heatsink-Aluminum...
  - nielsole 7y ago
    I am trying to hop by an electronics store tonight. Will keep you posted :)
  - megous 7y ago
    Those are mostly useless (they only slow down temperature changes a little). Only thing that really helps is active cooling / moving the air. You also have to figure out the placement of the board. The air will move via convection, and if you get air movement from a hotter part of the board (PMIC) to the SoC, you'll not improve things much. I don't think perf gains in Rpi4 are of much use, if it idles at 65°C (my ambient temperature is ~32°C at home) and has to throttle down to <1GHz under persistent load.
    - close04 7y ago
      > they only slow down temperature changes a little That already helps a lot if you don't need to maintain full power for long periods. It gives just enough thermal inertia to handle spikes without throttling. For extended periods you may need to move to bigger heatsink or active cooling.
DCKing 7y ago
The Raspberry Pi 4 is really impressive hardware for the price. In these CPU benchmarks with heatsink attached, it slightly edges out the Jetson Nano developer board, which retails for $99. Since one of the popular uses of the Raspberry Pi is to be an emulation box, this will mean it will now be capable of running most of the N64, Dreamcast and PSP library comfortably. The Raspberry Pi 3B+ could barely handle even select easier-to-emulate titles of these systems. It might even start running a handful of GameCube and Wii titles now using Dolphin. It also helps it to run tricks to vastly reduce input lag that troubles most emulation setups [1]. And the nice thing is that all of that should even work on the cheapest 1GB model. It's even conceivable this can be used as a desktop in many ways. It is faster than some Chromebooks. However this will probably only truly enjoyable to use when using PXE for its main OS drive to have I/O performed on a server that can leverage SSD storage. Mind you that the software is in a very pre release state, so none of this is really doable at the moment of writing. Especially the VideoCore (GPU and hardware video codec) driver seems to be in quite a sorry state and there's not even a hint of Vulkan support. The beauty of having a Raspberry Pi over another single board computer is that software support will come eventually though. [1]: https://www.libretro.com/index.php/retroarch-runahead-and-raspberry-pi-4-the-results-are-in/ https://www.libretro.com/index.php/retroarch-runahead-and-ra...
- megous 7y ago
  > The beauty of having a Raspberry Pi over another single board computer is that software support will come eventually though. That's not unique to RPi. It's true for all kinds of SoCs from amlogic, through rockchip to allwinner, and probably others.
  - Havoc 7y ago
    The support is pretty unique in my experience. Purchased a different board (tinkerboard) and was susprised how much less info there is on the Internet, how outdated it is etc. Def made me reconsider buying anothrr non rasp board even if stronger
- tombert 7y ago
  In fairness to the Jetson Nano, aren't you mostly paying for the CUDA graphics card? The CPUs in there are good, but I'll bet the Nano beats it in the GPU department (at least once the firmwares and drivers are super-optimized). Though that may admittedly be cognitive dissonance, since I've been trying to talk myself into purchasing a Jetson for more than a month now.
knodi123 7y ago
Aww, the article explains that it's just the CPU that is running cooler. I was hoping we'd found a quick fix for global warming. :-(

299 points by close04 7y ago

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

> I did not understand VLI at first, but eventually understand this referred to the firmware for VIA VL805 PCIe USB 3.0 controller on the board. Possibly a stupid question: what does “VLI” stand for?

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
fwip 7y ago
After some googling, it looks like VLI is the manufacturer that produced the USB controller chip [1] for the Raspberry Pi, so I guess that VLI firmware is the firmware that they provided for their chip. [1] https://www.via-labs.com/product_show.php?id=48 https://www.via-labs.com/product_show.php?id=48
- Stratoscope 7y ago
  An amusing side note (or maybe I'm easily amused): A couple of years ago I bought a USB-C drive enclosure, and when I use the Windows "safe removal" menu it shows up as "VLI Product String". Yes, the case manufacturer didn't bother changing the string in the sample VLI firmware!

userbinator 7y ago

New USB controller firmware, apparently. The fact that it can have any effect on the CPU temperature is a little puzzling. I work in a office where the air conditioner is set to 28°C Wow. As someone who is used to a room temperature of 20C, 28C is above the point of idle sweating and becoming lethargic. While that's still within the range that most consumer electronics are rated for, I believe a room temperature of 20C is the normal design target.

rtpg 7y ago
I know this is now totally unrelated to raspi but where do you live? Setting your AC to 20C seems freezing to me and I almost never set my AC below 26C (Tokyo)
- losteric 7y ago
  I think it's an American thing. My workplace (Seattle) keeps the AC set around 72F (22C). In the summer, I walk to work in a t-shirt around 7AM, then put on a thin hoodie at work... Feels weird to me, but college and people's homes are usually set to mid-70F too (or ambient temperature).
  - atoav 7y ago
    I hate this — yet it is very typical in southern European nations too. The way I see it you always long for what you don’t have. That is why in torching hot places they tend to cool things really down and wear long pants and a second layer, while in northern nations people will run around in shorts and thin dresses literally the first time it seems to be a little bit summerish. I think that big of a temperature difference is not only a tremendous waste of energy (that heats the rest of the outside at the same time), but it is also quite impractical: you always have to carry around a second layer if you are planing to stay somwhere for more than an hour. There you are, carrying around that hoodie, just because the rooms are cooled down to much.
- darkpuma 7y ago
  In the US, 20-24C is a pretty typical AC setting, with commercial buildings usually closer to the cool end. I don't put on a jacket (other than for fashion) until 15C or so. For me, 26C would negatively impact my productivity.
  - kjar 7y ago
    In my experience for reasons unknown to me men run hotter than women leading to endless battles at the thermostat

Arbalest 7y ago

When we say firmware, are we talking about a binary blob? Can it be replaced if we're willing to take an efficiency hit?

sneak 7y ago
The RPi has several proprietary binary blobs required for it to function, and always has. This has been one of my long-standing gripes about the platform’s security.
- gjsman-1000 7y ago
  Unfortunately, there are no boards on the market (that I know of) that don't have any closed-source blobs. Also (unfortunately) it is probably going to stay this way because of legal requirements. 1) Broadcom has quite a bit of stuff they want hidden and don't allow any of their many customers (including the Pi) to open-source. 2) The Pi 4's SoC has a hardware H.264 block and hardware H.265 block. Older Pi's had a hardware MPEG-2, hardware VC-1, and hardware H.264 block. These blocks require royalties and are _heavily_ protected by MPEG LA. If open-source software was released that could control these blocks, you could possibly expect a huge lawsuit against the Raspberry Pi Trading arm. 3) To the Pi's benefit, the VideoCore is not open-source but is the most openly-documented GPU available in a mobile device. Most Pi competitors use Mali, which if you look at Hackaday's Pine64 Un-Review, works with almost nothing and has wretched documentation. There is some open-source work, but quite a bit remains closed or completely inoperable on Linux. 4) If you need platform security, look elsewhere. The Pi doesn't support secure boot, licensed code signing requirements, and the new Pi 4 allows almost anyone to update the USB and SoC EEPROMs just by putting in a new SD card and running a few commands. 5) Cortex-A72 on Pi 4 is venerable to Spectre.
  - xeeeeeeeeeeenu 7y ago
    >These blocks require royalties and are _heavily_ protected by MPEG LA. If open-source software was released that could control these blocks, you could possibly expect a huge lawsuit against the Raspberry Pi Trading arm. I think you're confusing copyright and patents. Just because some technology is patented, it doesn't mean it can't be open sourced.

sneak 7y ago

The fact that the RPi has writable onboard state/storage of any kind whatsoever (save for the fuses which are WORM) comes as news to me. The SoC firmware is loaded from the FAT partition on the SD card, so there is no “flashing” (in the traditional EEPROM sense) of the system firmware. Apparently the USB chip has its own EEPROM?

cesarb 7y ago
To make things worse, AFAIK the USB chip is connected through PCIe, so unless the RPi has an IOMMU, it could in theory DMA to anywhere in the host memory.
- gjsman-1000 7y ago
  I don't know the details, but the memory controller is twice as fast for the SD card than the old Pi's are, and SOMETHING (I'm not sure for certain what, don't quote me) did change with the memory subsystem. This change is what allowed a workaround which allowed for 4GB of RAM for the first time (whereas before, the 1GB of RAM was a limitation throughout the SoC). So, it _may_ have a lite-IOMMU, but I'd open a forum posting for more info. Edit: This could also be why the SoC uses an EEPROM. The RPF said that booting the Pi4 with this new memory system is _much_ more complicated than booting a Pi3, and that permanently burning the boot code into the SoC (like on the Pi3 and earlier) was not an option for the Pi4. Extremely high risk of backfiring.
  - makomk 7y ago
    As far as I know, the SoC supported higher SD card speeds all the way back to the first Pi and the original drivers even tried to use them. The trouble is, the older Pis couldn't switch to the lower IO voltages required to actually operate at those speeds. Early adopters actually had to track down older, slower SD cards in order to use their Pis because otherwise SD card access would fail due to the driver erroneously switching speeds.
    - gjsman-1000 7y ago

feedbeef 7y ago

Sadly, I can’t measure [power consumption] as my power meter is dead. Would be nice to see those measurements, as RPi 4's idle consumption (initial reports of ~3 watts) is quite poor compared to RPi 2B and 3B's ~1 watt.

close04 7y ago
From what I've read it consumes 1W extra over the 3B+. But it's understandable given that everything that could be upgraded was upgraded. Far more powerful CPU, USB/Eth, and possibly 3GB of extra RAM.

hendry 7y ago

High temperatures and other Rpi4 issues are covered by Andreas Spiess in https://youtu.be/0diTHAmVbhc https://youtu.be/0diTHAmVbhc

gloflo 7y ago
In what way? Any interesting or just stating the same facts that a 15 line paragraph could cover?

nielsole 7y ago

I just tried out the Pi 4 yesterday and after a couple of hours of headless idling with no peripherals connected (just wifi) it was so hot, I almost burned my finger. So this is definitely welcomed. But heatsinks or even fans will likely be necessary to do anything with the pi 4

penagwin 7y ago
I don't have a pi 4 to play with, but is there any chance you could try one of the mini heatsinks that just adhere onto the cpu, without any active cooling? I'm just curious to see if that helps much, they're pretty cheap and could be useful other places too (I use one on the VTX for my drone) You can check the temperature though the pi itself. From my experience depending on the material/length of contact, things start to get too hot to comfortably hold after ~55C/60C for most metals, but brief contact might barely feel warm. [0] https://www.amazon.com/Easycargo-Raspberry-Heatsink-Aluminum-conductive/dp/B07217N5LS/ https://www.amazon.com/Easycargo-Raspberry-Heatsink-Aluminum...
- nielsole 7y ago
  I am trying to hop by an electronics store tonight. Will keep you posted :)
- megous 7y ago
  Those are mostly useless (they only slow down temperature changes a little). Only thing that really helps is active cooling / moving the air. You also have to figure out the placement of the board. The air will move via convection, and if you get air movement from a hotter part of the board (PMIC) to the SoC, you'll not improve things much. I don't think perf gains in Rpi4 are of much use, if it idles at 65°C (my ambient temperature is ~32°C at home) and has to throttle down to <1GHz under persistent load.
  - close04 7y ago
    > they only slow down temperature changes a little That already helps a lot if you don't need to maintain full power for long periods. It gives just enough thermal inertia to handle spikes without throttling. For extended periods you may need to move to bigger heatsink or active cooling.

DCKing 7y ago

The Raspberry Pi 4 is really impressive hardware for the price. In these CPU benchmarks with heatsink attached, it slightly edges out the Jetson Nano developer board, which retails for $99. Since one of the popular uses of the Raspberry Pi is to be an emulation box, this will mean it will now be capable of running most of the N64, Dreamcast and PSP library comfortably. The Raspberry Pi 3B+ could barely handle even select easier-to-emulate titles of these systems. It might even start running a handful of GameCube and Wii titles now using Dolphin. It also helps it to run tricks to vastly reduce input lag that troubles most emulation setups [1]. And the nice thing is that all of that should even work on the cheapest 1GB model. It's even conceivable this can be used as a desktop in many ways. It is faster than some Chromebooks. However this will probably only truly enjoyable to use when using PXE for its main OS drive to have I/O performed on a server that can leverage SSD storage. Mind you that the software is in a very pre release state, so none of this is really doable at the moment of writing. Especially the VideoCore (GPU and hardware video codec) driver seems to be in quite a sorry state and there's not even a hint of Vulkan support. The beauty of having a Raspberry Pi over another single board computer is that software support will come eventually though. [1]: https://www.libretro.com/index.php/retroarch-runahead-and-raspberry-pi-4-the-results-are-in/ https://www.libretro.com/index.php/retroarch-runahead-and-ra...

megous 7y ago
> The beauty of having a Raspberry Pi over another single board computer is that software support will come eventually though. That's not unique to RPi. It's true for all kinds of SoCs from amlogic, through rockchip to allwinner, and probably others.
- Havoc 7y ago
  The support is pretty unique in my experience. Purchased a different board (tinkerboard) and was susprised how much less info there is on the Internet, how outdated it is etc. Def made me reconsider buying anothrr non rasp board even if stronger
tombert 7y ago
In fairness to the Jetson Nano, aren't you mostly paying for the CUDA graphics card? The CPUs in there are good, but I'll bet the Nano beats it in the GPU department (at least once the firmwares and drivers are super-optimized). Though that may admittedly be cognitive dissonance, since I've been trying to talk myself into purchasing a Jetson for more than a month now.

knodi123 7y ago

Aww, the article explains that it's just the CPU that is running cooler. I was hoping we'd found a quick fix for global warming. :-(