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Pi 5 overclocking: Silicon Lottery
- smellf 3y ago> RK3588-based SBC Anyone know which SBCs use this chip?
- geerlingguy 3y agoRadxa Rock 5 model B, Turing Pi RK1, Orange Pi 5 (and Plus); there are a few others but those are the models I have purchased and tested. All are more efficient/faster... but also more expensive and less supported. Though RK3599 and 3588 SoCs have both been some of the most widely supported out of Rockchip for Linux applications. They still lack compared to Pi's support though.
- mort96 3y agoThe NanoPi R6C/R6S as well. The rk3588 is a nice chip, but support just isn't there yet if you want to do anything with the GPU. The "Panthor" GPU driver, which is the FOSS driver which supports its GPU, was just merged in to Linux and mesa this month[1] (yay!) which means you're probably gonna have to build your own kernel if you want it. The old mali proprietary driver is borderline unusable on anything remotely modern, only really working on Linux 5.10 and special X11 builds with legacy features re-enabled. It's crazy that the rk3588 has been on the market for many years at this point and is just now starting to be usable on Linux, but it's exciting that things are taking shape. [1] https://www.collabora.com/news-and-blog/news-and-events/release-the-panthor.html https://www.collabora.com/news-and-blog/news-and-events/rele...
- rcarmo 3y agoI’ve been tracking that and NPU support. Neither are… OK at this point.
- lenerdenator 3y ago> They still lack compared to Pi's support though. This should be the central lesson learned from the Raspberry Pi by open-source projects. There will be faster, there will be smaller, there will be cheaper. But if the user can go on the web and find the _exact_ thing they're looking to do spelled out, they'll buy that product, every time.
- rcarmo 3y agoI have been testing quite a few: https://taoofmac.com/space/blog/2024/02/10/2000 https://taoofmac.com/space/blog/2024/02/10/2000
- moffkalast 3y agoSpeaking of Geerling testing Pi 5 things, is it just me or is it super weird that the uPCity PCIe breakout board hasn't been put on sale yet? I think it's almost half a year since he got it working in a pre-release state.
- tuetuopay 3y agoI recently went on the lookout for this board and it is still unavailable. All I could find were M.2 adapters. I guess the market for full-size PCIe is tiny compared to the M.2 one. Anyways, I ended up making my own and it works great. No fuss, no wait, no complications.
- moffkalast 3y agoAh you mean going the Pi Port -> M.2 hat -> M.2 to PCIe riser route? I suppose that should work. Any bandwidth issues?
- tuetuopay 3y agoNo, I literally made my own hand-soldered Pi Port -> PCIe adapter. That's to plug a 2x25Gbps programmable NIC, so no bandwidth needed because the NIC does all the work. All I needed was something to power up the nic :D As for bandwidth, well, it's one lane of PCIe gen 2. This won't win any races but can be useful to access exotic hardware not available in usb or if you don't care about bandwidth. (e.g. HBA with many drives for mass storage without speed requirement).
- stu2010 3y agoHow much power is the Pi port capable of delivering, or are you sending additional power to the PCIe adapter from somewhere else? What SmartNIC are you using? Most SmartNICs that I'm aware of suck a decent amount of power, many more require significant external airflow. Are you using the Mikrotik active cooled one? https://mikrotik.com/product/ccr2004_1g_2xs_pcie https://mikrotik.com/product/ccr2004_1g_2xs_pcie
- TehCorwiz 3y agoMy Pi 5 is still back ordered. :(
- natebc 3y agoI ordered one from pishop.us just last Friday that arrived via USPS on Monday morning. Might look around some and see if you can just order from a different vendor.
- techwiz137 3y agoFor the time it took them to develop it, the performance is really lackluster. I would've definitely wanted an OrangePi 5 equivalent performance, but with the mature software of the RPI.
- TehCorwiz 3y agoYeah, I ordered from Sparkfun. I've had good experiences with them in the past, but it's a little frustrating seeing it available elsewhere. I ended up reaching out about it.
- teamonkey 3y agohttps://rpilocator.com/?cat=PI5 https://rpilocator.com/?cat=PI5
- geerlingguy 3y agoThey've been on the shelf (well, behind the counter) at Micro Center for a month or so now, never seen them out of stock. It seems like all the models are available at one or two retailers at minimum now, via rpilocator.com. Are you in the US, Canada, or EU? Outside of those places, there may still be some delays in getting stock to meet demand.
- duffyjp 3y agoOof, $80 is encroaching on Aliexpress N100 Mini PCs and used "Tiny/Mini/Micro" territory. I have the original and updated Pi Zero W-- unbelievable bargains at ~$15 but if I needed any horsepower I think I'd rather have an x86_64 so I can run whatever.
- MuffinFlavored 3y ago> The result of that 3.0 GHz overclock? A marginally-improved Geekbench 6 score of 1662, versus 1507 with no OC. To achieve that 10% speedup, it ate up about 20% more power, so efficiency-wise, it's not worth it. What effect would running an overclock like this permanently have on longevity? Is it even worth thinking about "longevity" of chips? Obviously stability suffers but for example... how much? Author was able to get a Geekbench 6 benchmark to pass. If they tried 100 times, would it be expected that a non-zero amount would fail?
- techwiz137 3y agoOf course! These are like BGA or something similar, the solder will crack after some number of on/off/cool/heat cycles. If voltage is raised we enter the realm of electromigration, though not sure how relevant it is for such a minuscule OC. As for stability, yes. If the voltage is not sufficient there will be stability issues which will require further raising it, thus raising temps and requiring more power which you can't be sure if you could deliver. And then of course electromigration.
- 0x457 3y ago> Of course! These are like BGA or something similar, the solder will crack after some number of on/off/cool/heat cycles. This was mostly happening during the transition to lead-free solder. Today, component should fail earlier than BGA.
- sweetjuly 3y agoUnfortunately, most of the useful data you want about wearout is locked behind tech NDAs so nobody will be able to offer specifics here. But in general, the way you tend to end up with wearout is through electron migration ("electron wind") which is damage to interconnects from electrons slamming into metal atoms over and over and slowly ripping apart the wires. Modeling electron migration correctly is really hard, but (from memory) a general relationship is that voltage linearly increases failure rate and temperature exponentially increases it. The constants for these models are determined empirically and, of course, are NDA'd. In general, I wouldn't worry about it. The MTTF for semiconductors is already very high even under awful temperatures 100+ C, and so as long as you cool it properly you'll be fine. > would it be expected that a non-zero amount would fail? The failures you describe here are going to be due to setup time violations. These issues shouldn't be transient (assuming identical temperature and voltage) since the performance characteristics of an individual device don't really change over time. Of course, the issues can seem transient as the failures may not actually always cause noticeable corruption (maybe you generate a wrong FPU result but that specific path is only exercised under rare uarch conditions). So, it's a non-answer, but: yes and no. Maybe your chip is perfectly okay and never has any violations at the parameters you selected. Maybe it does. Neither you (nor in fact the manufacturer, though they do have a better chance since they know the process/design) can ever really be sure--all that's left is empirical burn in testing and hoping for the best :)
- kloch 3y agoI remember overclocking the 486DX2-66 in the early 90's. I got the idea after reading my brother's Intel data book and noticed that while the max clock speed was speced at 66 MHz, all of the timing diagrams implied it could run to 80. I borrowed a variable speed clock generator and sure enough it was stable at 80, and started to crash at around 82MHz. When I started to help friends overclock theirs, I quickly realized the "silicon lottery" variance. Some would only run reliably at 78 or 76 MHz. I bought a bunch of fixed frequency clock generators (that were drop-in replacements for the original on the motherboard) in 2MHz increments due to the variance. This was back before CPU's had heat sinks or fans, so we quickly figured out that adding those gave better margins. We even made some 10-LED bar temperature display that had a thermocouple glued to the CPU case and indicated 10 degree C increments (green=0-60c, yellow=70-80c, red=90-100c).
- winslow 3y agoThat sounds like a lot of fun. Do you happen to have any photos of you tinkering especially with the 10-LED bar temp displays?
- gorkish 3y agoI remember overclocking my calculator (TI-85, 1992, Z80 CPU) ... its LO was a 2.7K/22pF RC oscillator which gave it an approximately 2.5MHz clock. To get this type of oscillator to speed up you'd normally lower the capacitance a bit. The reason that this story is interesting is that in most cases you could just yank C9 entirely and with nothing more than a resistor between the clock pins, you'd get a roughly 300% performance increase. I guess the parasitic capacitance was enough to still oscillate a bit although mostly it would have been random. Looking back, this was basically a CPU being clocked with 50mhz noise and still running happily! Amazing!
- lloydatkinson 3y agoNot quite the same but I once was bored enough to keep trying to see how low power a solar powered calculator could work with. I held my hand over the solar panel at various lengths until the screen cut out and while doing this I just kept hitting random keys and while lifting my hand up. One day when I did this I must have hit the one in a million chance. It started rapidly counting up by itself! I think I only got it to happen once more. I suspect the fluctuating voltage and it trying to do calculations while I was pressing keys was just enough to get some gates latched into the wrong state, somehow.
- bee_rider 3y ago> To achieve that 10% speedup, it ate up about 20% more power, so efficiency-wise, it's not worth it. There’s a trade off between single threaded performance and power, right? I’d expect the increase in power cost to be between the performance increase squared or cubed. If you expect a one-to-one trade it is never worth it to increase frequency, haha. The universe will give you throughput at a fair rate, but it is very stingy about latency, in general.
- latchkey 3y agoI ran 150,000 GPUs that were individually tuned for maximum performance. Silicon lottery, where the chip was on the wafer (edges tend to be less reliable), manufacturing batches, component batches, heat, cooling, power supplies, etc... the list goes on and on... It is understated how much all of this is a huge impactful thing on performance and stability.
- cute_boi 3y agoOne thing I don't understand why would people buy raspberry pi instead of mini pc. Mini PC seems to be small, better and more versatile than pi.
- cricalix 3y agoYou know, he has a video on that too. If you want GPIO, a tiny PC is not the answer (for example).
- AnthonBerg 3y agoI need to try one of these USB GPIO thingies. Add GPIO to, well, any computer? Adafruit FT232H Breakout - General Purpose USB to GPIO, SPI, I2C - USB C & Stemma QT: https://www.adafruit.com/product/2264 https://www.adafruit.com/product/2264 Adafruit MCP2221A Breakout - General Purpose USB to GPIO ADC I2C - Stemma QT / Qwiic: https://www.adafruit.com/product/4471 https://www.adafruit.com/product/4471
- squarefoot 3y agoMini PCs don't come with GPIOs, which are one of the main reasons that make small SBCs a better choice for some uses. Not a big problem though as there are cheap add on boards bringing GPIO ports to every device. Example: https://www.hardkernel.com/shop/usb-io-board/ https://www.hardkernel.com/shop/usb-io-board/ The downside is that code becomes slightly more complicated, the upside is that it makes easier to replace the Mini PC with a totally different one, or even emulate it in a VM then connecting the GPIO board using USB pass through. Rethinking GPIO can also open more possibilities such as putting them beyond a network (say Arduino+ENC28j60 and similar ones for Ethernet, ESP32 for wireless, etc); of course having them outside the main CPU will imply some speed and latency issues, although I'm sure they would remain unnoticed for many non critical use cases. My question would rather be why the RPi when there are better SBCs out there, but that is my personal taste and the Armbian and DietPi communities being more than enough for me.