Engineers at the Raspberry Pi Foundation have made performance upgrades to the Raspberry Pi 5 and, to some degree, the Raspberry Pi 4. The boost comes from adjusted memory settings.

The team worked with Micron engineers and used information from Micron’s datasheets to make these improvements. This lets the devices use memory more quickly while staying cool. Instead of needing to overclock or have a deep knowledge of DRAM settings, the improvements could come automatically through firmware updates. It’s not a guarantee that they will be in an update, but if it’s there, there’s not much reason not to release it to users.

After some testing, Jeff Geerling, an experienced Raspberry Pi user and hacker, found that the Raspberry Pi 5 runs about 10% to 20% faster at its standard speed of 2.4 GHz. When he overclocked it to 3.2 GHz, the performance improved by 32%. These speed gains come from adjusting the memory settings, usually kept conservative for stability so that the Pi can use the RAM more effectively. The improved settings are based on Micron’s technical documents but have been fine-tuned to provide the best performance. Geerling also kept an eye on temperatures to make sure the RAM didn’t overheat.

The exact technical details are complicated, but they involve a better understanding of the hardware and adjusting the SDRAM timings to boost performance. These improvements will likely help both the Raspberry Pi 5 and the Raspberry Pi 4, but the 4 would be to a much lesser extent. This basically just means that the memory systems and how they are controlled are similar in both models.

It’s good for users that Raspberry Pi is still working on improving existing hardware. The team recently released the Raspberry Pi Compute, so there is definitely still a stream of new hardware coming. A date wasn’t given as to when this could come out, but for now, it’s a good idea to keep an eye out for this update and the official website so you can upgrade your Raspberry Pi, too.

Source: HackADay