News : Raspberry Pi introduces 1 GHz turbo mode overclocking option

The Raspberry Pi mini computer has a 700 MHz Broadcom BCM2835 ARM11 processor. But users have been adjusting the voltage and overclocking the chip to run at higher speeds for months.

Up until now, the Raspberry Pi Foundation has supported doing that — but warned that it could potentially damage the hardware, and that it would therefore void the warranty.

Now the group has come up with an official “turbo mode” which lets you overclock the CPU without voiding the $35 computer’s warranty.

Turbo mode offers 5 different presets, with speeds as high as 1 GHz, for a 50 percent performance boost.

Even at the highest clock speeds, the processor doesn’t run hotter than 185 degrees, which means adjusting the voltage shouldn’t cause any damage to the processor.

The new turbo mode features are included in the latest Raspbian Linux operating system. There’s also a new temperature and frequency widget which helps you monitor the CPU state, support for WiFi out of the box, and audio improvements.

Read more »

Nexus 7 Overclocked to 1.64 Ghz, Destroys Tablets Priced 3x More

Today, the super cheap but oh-so-smooth Nexus 7 Tablet was overclocked to 1.6 GHz., which is incredibly impressive considering that's almost double the score of its closest competitor, the HTC One X.
Developer Morfic and his friends installed the Trinity kernel on the device before they managed to get the Nexus 7's Nvidia Tegra 3 quad-core processor up to an insane 1.64 GHz on Quadrant. Better still, battery life didn't suffer a bit!
There aren't any real-world tests that have shown the Nexus 7 is this fast in day-to-day tasks, but the fact is the Nexus 7 just won against a bunch of devices that cost THREE TIMES as much money.
If you're playing a game like Nova 3 on an overclocked kernel, you may see a SLIGHT difference in speed on the Nexus 7 versus the ASUS Transformer Prime. And that's a big, big deal for a tablet that is ostensibly geared towards budget customers. Google has set the bar really high here. I'm super impressed.

Read more »

Overclock a Samsung Galaxy Tab 2 (7.0) to 1.3 GHz

The Samsung Galaxy Tab 2 (7.0) is an inexpensive 7 inch tablet with a decent screen, a relatively zippy 1 GHz dual core processor, and Android 4.0 operating system.
But if you want to get even more performance out of this $249 tablet and don’t mind voiding your warranty (and possibly breaking something in the process), there’s a way to do that.

Now that it’s possible to root the 7 inch tablet, install ClockworkMod Recovery, and even load custom ROMs, hackers have also started playing with custom kernels.
Android developer Metallice has released a kernel for the Samsung Galaxy Tab 2 (7.0) which allows users to overclock and underclock the tablet’s processor and even the graphics processor.
Normally the TI OMAP 4430 chip has a top speed of 1 GHz, and the graphics core runs at 307 MHz. The Metallice kernel lets the CPU run at speeds up to 1350 MHz and the GPU can be overclocked to 448 MHz.
The chip can also run as low as 150 MHz to save energy when you don’t need all that extra performance.
You can install the custom kernel by first installing ClockworkMod Recovery and then using the “install zip from sdcard” option to load the kernel. Download links for the latest versions of the kernel are available at RootzWiki.
Keep in mind, this is not officially supported by Samsung and you will almost certainly void your warranty. So if you damage your device don’t expect anyone to fix or replace it for you.

Read more »