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Raspberry Pi boosts Pi 5 performance with SDRAM tuning


l;dr Raspberry Pi engineers tweaked SDRAM timings and other memory settings on the Pi, resulting in a 10-20% speed boost at the default 2.4 GHz clock. I of course had to test overclocking, which got me a 32% speedup at 3.2 GHz! Changes may roll out in a firmware update for all Pi 5 and Pi 4 users soon.

They've talked to Micron and implemented a number of small tweaks that—along with NUMA emulation—really add up to a performance improvement for multi-core workloads. Adding a 3.2 GHz overclock on top (using my pi-overvolt hack to boost voltages), those increases go to +32% single, +31% multi, resulting in yet another world-record Geekbench 6 score! RAM timings were already not happy at those speeds, and with the extra SDRAM tweaks, I imagine extreme overclocking will be even more unstable.

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