Recently Raspberry Pi released the 2GB version of the Raspberry Pi 5 with a new BCM2712 SoC featuring the D0 stepping. As expected, [Jeff Geerling] got his mitts on one of these boards and ran it through its paces, with positive results. Well, mostly positive results — as the Geekbench test took offence to the mere 2 GB of RAM on the board and consistently ran out of memory by the multi-core Photo Filter test, as feared when we originally reported on this new SBC. Although using swap is an option, this would not have made for a very realistic SoC benchmark, ergo [Jeff] resorted to using sysbench instead.
Naturally some overclocking was also performed, to truly push the SoC to its limits. This boosted the clock speed from 2.4 GHz all the way up to 3.5 GHz with the sysbench score increasing from 4155 to 6068. At 3.6 GHz the system wouldn’t boot any more, but [Jeff] figured that delidding the SoC could enable even faster speeds. This procedure also enabled taking a look at the bare D0 stepping die, revealing it to be 32.5% smaller than the previous C1 stepping on presumably the same 16 nm process.
Although 3.5 GHz turns out to be a hard limit for now, the power usage was interesting with idle power being 0.9 watts lower (at 2.4 W) for the D0 stepping and the power and temperatures under load also looked better than the C1 stepping. Even when taking the power savings of half the RAM versus the 4 GB version into account, the D0 stepping seems significantly more optimized. The main question now is when we can expect to see it appear on the 4 and 8 GB versions of the SBC, though the answer there is likely ‘when current C1 stocks run out’.
35% smaller is a lot smaller, and given the lower power usage as well (I wouldn’t expect unused dark silicon to use much but it isn’t unlikely that power gating wasn’t present) I wonder if this is a 12nm shrink. Or maybe there was a lot of unused silicon!
I guess we will have to wait for the die photos!
3.5GHz is pretty good though, I wasn’t aware Pi5 overclocked that well, as Pi4 was dodgy over 2GHz.
This chip likely has a lot of complicated IO the Pi is not using. The GPU might also have extra features, video encoder blocks maybe.
Have two of the 2GB boards on the way. One will be used in my PiDP-10 project I am currently soldering up. Won’t be any need to over-clock for my use case.
30% is significant. I choose SoC for my retrogaming needs since the power usage and thermal output are quite low compared to a desktop PC or laptop. Ive held off on Pi5 but this 2G variant might change my mind.
Boy I wish there was ANYTHING open source about the raspi at all. Then we could know more.
Defense contracts preclude this.
And who signed up to those when the could have used any of a variety of more open chips?
No, raspi chose to use the custom-made SoC that they do.
Maybe I should focus on hardware that isn’t likely to be used in a drone strike?
More accurately, RPi had to fill out NDAA (National Defense Authorization Act) paperwork in order to sell to contractors that also accept military contracts. Most of us in the business have to do it. But I always feel pretty dirty about it.
I believe it is unlikely RPi is actually used in any military capacity. But it is clearly not Open Source Hardware (OSH). And it never was meant to be. Kind of impossible if you buy ARM IP blocks and put them into your system. You can make a better effort than RPi has done to release low-level details. But it isn’t going to be OSH as long as you put your design together from proprietary IP.
Guess I’m one of those peace and love hippies that isn’t rooting and cheering for the military-industrial complex.
Even building around ARM cores, there’s a lot more raspi could do. NXP/Freescale/whoever-they-are-now make ARM chips and provide copious documentation on various SoCs like the i.mx line. I’m talking multi-thousand-page datasheets, free to download. It’s one of the reasons the i.mx8 is/was so beloved.
Meanwhile raspi give out damn near nothing. Not even the schematics for their boards, which is common for everyone else in the market and even most dev boards. “But I guess it doesn’t matter because only raspi can buy the chips anyway.” Meanwhile they also expect us to run their proprietary bootloader to boot the chip and their privileged VPU firmware on the VPU core 24/7. Oh, and then there’s also that DRM to lock-out 3rd party camera modules (based on the Microchip ATSHA204A).
Raspi isn’t a charity, they’re a massive corporation trading on the stock market who prioritize selling proprietary hardware and software to industrial partners. They just happen to make use of a mostly-open-source OS. This is the same company that gave microsoft root access to everyone’s Pi by default in a VScode partnership.
Lots of incorrect in this thread.
Military contracts have nothing to do with how much documentation is available on the SoC. No idea where that completely incorrect rumour has come from, somebody making stuff up on the internet for clicks I guess. The SoC is a Brcm part, and the docs for it are under NDA, so it’s not Pi’s fault they cannot publish. What they have published is a datasheet on the RP1 used on the Pi5, because that is their home grown silicon. It’s still in draft though and awaiting some updates.
As for OSH, it never has been, because it’s not a dev board. It’s a production device. How many production devices nowadays publish any sort of schematics at all?
And now on to firmware – the firmware on the Pi5 now does very little – boots the device, manages clocks, manages thermals. Everything else is now open source. 3D, cameras, graphics. So really from a SW point of view, its now extremely open.
And as for M’s last comment – a massive corporation? 150 people? Really? As for root access, completely untrue. No root access was given to any one with VSCode, there is no MS partnership. That sentence is complete nonsense.
Interesting. I posted something that refuted almost everything in the previous post which appears has been deleted. Is there some sort of conspiracy against actual facts being posted about Raspberry Pi?
Third time lucky. Maybe the modding is less rapid over the weekend, in which case sorry for the third post.
Pi are limited by the documentation they can publish on the SoC by the chip provider, Broadcom. Data under NDA cannot be passed on. When the chip is their own, there is full documentation (e.g. RP1, RP2040, ROP2350)
Pi SW is much more open now. The firmware does very little; boot, clock management and thermal management is pretty much it. All the rest is open source (e.g. Mesa for 3D, DRM/KMS for display and compositing, libcamera etc)
Raspberry Pi has less than 200 employees, if you think that is massive corporation, well, not sure what to say. They are traded though, so that is at least correct.
There are no partnerships with MS and never have been. The VSCode stuff is just a plugin to VS code for RP2xxx development, which you don’t need to use if you don’t want to. The root access thing is a new one on me.
The pi is definitely used in some military applications. Several of the drones used in Ukraine use a pi as a “companion computer” for communication and target identification.
To be fair, most of those drones are made using duct tape.
Just to be absolutely clear, out of the hundred million or so customers of Rpi, there’s about 10 of you boring anoraks that care about it being open source. You’ve all probably bought one anyway.
Jeff covered this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3E0jRUng7_A