A firmware update, currently in alpha testing and due for public release as soon as it has been proven it’s not going to crash anything, offers a glimpse at the fruit of the engineers’ labour: tweaks which drop the power draw of the VL805 controller considerably, making the whole Raspberry Pi 4 run cooler.
To test the firmware out, a Raspberry Pi 4 was put on the test bench in two configurations: first running the launch-day firmware as supplied on all retail models and the second running the alpha-test release of the updated VL805 firmware. Both configurations were booted with a single HDMI-connected display, wireless keyboard and mouse dongle in the USB port, and a wired Ethernet connection, to reflect the most common usage, and set running a workload which combined sustained CPU and GPU activity.
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