Delidding the new Pi 5 to find the 'dark silicon'

[@JeffGeerling]

Hello everyone! Our baby is on the way, so I won't be around to respond to comments for a bit :) I'm still going to do more testing on the D0 chip at some point, and a few other people are also doing more testing, so for the latest, please check my blog or the GitHub issue linked in the description (but don't expect any updates from me soon lol). I have a couple other fun videos in progress, but I won't be finishing them up for a couple weeks. Please go check out Novaspirit Tech and my 2nd channel, Level2Jeff, while I'm away! [Edit: Baby is here, everyone's healthy and I am going to enjoy little naps while baby+mom naps.]

[@jeremyandrey5890]

congrats !

[@MarcoGPUtuber]

Congrats!

[@ricdeh1701]

Good to hear. Wish you (and your wife + future baby) all the best

[@AdaptiveSystems]

send the pi to somoene like thecoder who can swap out the memory, so you have new silicone but with 8gb

[@ranjitmandal1612]

👏

[@slimhazard]

You underestimate the power of the Dark Side of the Silicon.

[@Progs420]

Hello there!

[@johnsimon8457]

It’s just … it’s just a redundant Ethernet controller “I am altering the die. Pray I do not step it any further.”

[@cv990a4]

Darth Jeff! Red Shirt Jeff's Lawful Evil cousin (Red Shirt Jeff is obviously Chaotic Neutral).

[@xBruceLee88x]

The Dalek in the poster approves the dark side of the silicon

[@Lurch-Bot]

WTF is Dark Silicon. Is it like antimatter?

[@MadMathMike]

I think some commenters are being a bit dramatic, but I agree that intermingling the sponsor segment with the delidding made for an unpleasant viewing experience. Love the channel. This was still a great video. We appreciate you, Jeff.

[@nickthaskater]

It was an ad read over him dragging a razor blade around the edge of the heat spreader. What did you miss?

[@lmaoroflcopter]

​@@nickthaskaterthe entire segment. I double tapped until he stopped talking about it.

[@nickthaskater]

@@lmaoroflcopter you have the power

[@lmaoroflcopter]

@@nickthaskater indeedy. Though it's nicer to wield that power without losing out on possible content. This time it was the simple act of delidding a chip, next time it's a much more detailed thing.

[@nickthaskater]

@@lmaoroflcopter gotta love rationalization with a baseless hypothetical. Again, if people didn't use ad blockers then creators would get their ad sense revenue and wouldn't need to "double dip" with in-video ads.

[@JTCF]

"I am voiding my warranty and here's a sponsor that allows me to afford that" - I like how this turns around

[@MarcoGPUtuber]

I delidded Jeff's channel to find the dark channel. I found Red Shirt Jeff.

[@youtou252]

"if you want to protect your private data, send your private data to this private data-protecting-company" lol

[@marcogenovesi8570]

you are not sending them your private data

[@lmaoroflcopter]

​@@marcogenovesi8570 by the same measure you're not sending your ISP your private data either. Who do you trust more? Your ISP or a random VPN provider?

[@marcogenovesi8570]

@@lmaoroflcopter you are not sending your ISP private data either. Do you know what https is? Most sites are encrypted nowadays, this is not the 90s anymore

[@DanTDMJace]

@@marcogenovesi8570this guys correct, especially with DNS-over-HTTPS

[@joepigott2001]

​@@marcogenovesi8570your ISP or VPN provider still gets information about your DNS requests. Using a VPN isn't really about security, it's about shifting your trust away from your ISP who has no obligation to keep any of your traffic private. From what I've seen surfshark isn't the worst, but it certainly isn't the best

[@NightHawkATL]

I kinda feel like the 2GB model is good for a single application that is happy with 2GB and requires high CPU utilization. Otherwise, it will be a good Docker host to run many small applications. 2GB won't get you much these days but still has some useful applications.

[@JeffGeerling]

Yep; it's definitely more of a specialist Pi. It's best if you have something that needs the faster CPU of Pi 5 but doesn't need much RAM. Otherwise I think the 4 or 8 GB Pi 4 is a better value, or if you need more RAM and more speed, the 4 or 8 GB Pi 5, or one of the Rockchip alternatives (testing more soon!).

[@Danrarbc]

@@JeffGeerling Given the performance of the Pi 5 the 2GB model might be ideal for an emulation box. PS2 and GameCube emulation might benefit a bit from the bump to 4GB but the chip isn’t quite powerful enough to run a bunch of games well.

[@foldionepapyrus3441]

I'd suggest 2GB is probably enough for almost every embedded use case, especially the ones that are 'headless' so the video memory footprint is entirely gone, and with just how performant the Pi5 CPU is now and the potential for really high speed storage thanks to the PCIe lane.

[@isbestlizard]

My first pc had 16MB and could run an operating system, office applications, a web browser, email client, and media player. I think some people forget just how fucking HUGE 2 GB of ram actually is.

[@aarong9378]

That will run a server distro (command line only) of Linux and a web server quite nicely, thank you. The commit charge on my web server, which serves 4 different sites, is just over 1GB.

[@ksdoubleshooter]

You might try turning off the lights in the room to fix issues with the delidded processor. Silicon is photosensitive and all the tiny p-n junctions are photodiodes.

[@pgtmr2713]

Then how can we see if he's wearing a red shirt!?!?😂

[@afurryferret]

He was using the delidded processor with a heatsink on top

[@ksdoubleshooter]

@@afurryferret He also ran it without the heat sink, with the backside to the die exposed to ambient air and light.

[@asm_nop]

It's a flip-chip design. The transistors are on the bottom of the silicon, and they're probably FinFETs, which have a lower body-diode effect. This silicon shouldn't be measurably photosensitive.

[@CedroCron]

Jeff, in playing with mine I've also found that eliminating noise in the power supply from noisy utility power and switching power supply noise can also help you crank more speed out of the chips without lock-up. I have notoriously noisy power in my area so I have a lot of mitigation in place to have clean power as noise free as possible because it drives my audio equipment nuts otherwise, but something I noticed is that clean power can also help you get more reliable overclocking as well. At least in my experience. Maybe hook up an oscilloscope to your AC mains and DC converted supply and see how yours is.

[@klmcwhirter]

Jeff, your attention to detail in these experiments continues to impress. There is no way I'll ever be able to leverage this info, but it scratches my "what if" itch in a huge way. Thanks. Congrats on the new family addition! And don't worry about the comments down time - we are all aware that production comes first. ;)

[@eldibs]

3:30 That first slice with the razor blade, when it slid too far, I took 1d3 Psychic damage.

[@Roosader]

bro unmasking the evil SOC

[@dw7444]

A few years ago some friends and I fooled around with submersion cooling in chilled oil. We put a motherboard in a plastic container, filled it with oil, and put it in a chest freezer full of ice... and it was awesome. Bare CPUs worked OK but the best performance was with a large solid copper heatsink on the CPU and a pump instead of a fan to circulate chilled oil across it. The biggest issue we had was finding a pump capable of actually pumping the chilled oil as it was very thick... we had to make sure the freezer wasn't set to cold of the oil would be too viscous, but even without the pump to circulate cold oil across the heatsink it still worked very well. We tried mineral oil as well as some other thinner oils. We did find that a couple of the oils attacked some of plastics pretty badly. I want to say we ended up settling on either plain mineral oil from the grocery store or a thinner version sold as sewing machine oil.... but I don't remember off the top of my head. Wonder what Pi in an oil filled container in the freezer would do....

[@greentravels2850]

Good to hear everybody is happy and healthy! I was looking forward to a more in-depth dive on this two gig version, you didn’t disappoint. Ars Technica apparently liked the video as well, your name and findings got a couple paragraphs in an article.

[@hannescampidell]

You could try to put a 8 GB memory chip on a 2 GB Pi 5 to test it to its fullest

[@Redacted384]

BGA reballing with jeff geerling? yeeee.

[@Darelumga]

I just bought a 8GB with D0 Stepping here in Germany

[@steven44799]

Congrats on the new baby.

[@bush2137]

So the fastest pi 5 would be the 2gb model with an 8gb chip soldered afterwards

[@foldionepapyrus3441]

Only probably with what we have seen so far - not enough 2gb models that have been benchmarked to know if the ones that have been are more golden samples or not on the silicon lottery and once you start addressing more RAM the power draw goes up, which might actually make the new pi slower - smaller die but now pushing similar power makes getting the heat out harder.

[@JeffGeerling]

Yep; it remains to be seen, the fact the Peltier had trouble pulling off heat from the tiny die means it may be diminishing returns. It's really hard to compare apples-to-apples if the RAM size is different, but I'm hopeful we'll still see a slightly better efficiency number as D0 makes it to larger Pi models.

[@mylittlevangoghcantbethisc5848]

I'm drunk and this video make no sense to me but it't still an entertaining watch nonetheless

[@sandmanxo]

Good to see both a 2gb pi5 and the new stepping. I can't see a reason this new stepping doesn't make it to the larger memory models and using less power is always a good thing, even if the difference is tiny.

[@Hope_Boat]

I ran an overclocked Celeron 300 with a Peltier back in the day. There is a side effect you might take in consideration: condensation of water due to humidity may build up ice around the CPU and create shorts when melting back. The solution was to thermally isolate the cold plate from ambient air.

[@RicardoRamosRetrocomputacao]

Some other factors can contribute to instability. There may not be a clock divider or clock separation for the entire card, and other things may be running at a higher clock rate, causing instability. The graphics solution may be one of the culprits.

[@tiagotiagot]

Maybe the heatspreader was doing more than just that, and perhaps the crash increase could suggest it was also serving as EM shielding?

[@yaniv_akrish]

7:38 I liked the reference to the "glass is glass" from(i believe JerryRigEverything) in the subtitles.

[@arjungupta3531]

I heard it in Zack's voice

[@jadusiv]

Testing different processor steppings… put a smile on my face to see this. Just funny how that’s 100% something I love and find fascinating as well. Never met another person in real life who does such things. You’re cool in my book.

[@jesuslovesyoujohn314-21]

I was surprised to see that delidding didn't help but then it is a tiny chip with limited heat produced. I think liquid nitrogen would be cool to see but dry ice would probably work just as well.

[@Jdbye]

You might've had hotspots on the die due to imperfect contact with the heatspreader removed, this is the problem heatspreaders are generally intended to solve, since neither the die nor heatsink will be perfectly flat and level and spreading out the contact area makes this less of an issue.

[@Ben333bacc]

My Pi 5 4 GB has been running my blog/website and pihole for my house, as well as some other stuff. I turn off things I don't need and got my ram usage down from 400 - 500 MB down now to 160 - 220 MB. I think 4 GB is actually a pretty generous amount for a headless device.

[@An.Individual]

6:18 difficult to understand. I expect if the power is off then consumption is 0W

[@hexidev]

Its the electronics that are running in standby. So you can turn it on and probably the ethernet jack

[@An.Individual]

@@ToroidalVortices I just put a power meter on my PI 4 running bookworm headless and WiFi. It is 1.7W idle and when shutdown 0W

[@siberx4]

Leakage is no joke on modern manufacturing nodes; even "inactive" silicon can consume significant amounts of power unless they're carefully power-gated, which is not always feasible depending on which segments are enabled/disabled.

[@raymondrached6301]

I think its a no brainer that they will bring the D0 stepping to the rest if the pi 5 models. Its much cheaper for them to produce and the efficiency is a bonus for the consumer.

[@Dextrolordt]

I read the title as "Diddling the new Pi 5" lmao

[@JeffGeerling]

👀

[@turbochargedfilms]

creampi

[@Ornithopter470]

Basically

[@hawaiihiker6285]

@@turbochargedfilms😂

[@reinux]

I came here to say the exact same thing

[@d3stinYwOw]

If that 'dark silicon' was also integrated ethernet controller, I think, for CM5, they might do something like D1 or E0, which brings it back for space savings on adapter board.

[@LostInThe0zone]

Congratulations to you, mom, and baby!

[@Utkrant]

Glass is glass and glass breaks. Power savings is power savings and power costs money.

[@thefrub]

I can't wait to get my hands on it in 5 years once the backorders go through Have to stick with the $40 thinkcentres off ebay for now

[@Ryan_Sauer]

You need to put down thinner thermal pads (or better yet just use thermal paste on the memory chips) if the pi was happier without the heat sync than with it. You removed essentially 2mm from your chip's height by removing the IHS but didnt remove 2mm from the memory thermal pads.

[@toseltreps1101]

heat sync 🤣🤣🤣

[@Tall_Order]

Devs need to get into the habit of being minimalistic. Just because I upgraded my ram to 64GB, doesn't mean I want you to eat all of it. lol It's like stocking your food pantry. I didn't do it so my kids could eat more food. I did it to have extra, for emergencies.

[@murrayedington]

6:00 is it possible that the naked chip is light sensitive? Many semiconductor devices are....

[@iamdarkyoshi]

Superglue something to the IHS, and twist. Much easier delid with no risk of cutting the substrate

[@JeffGeerling]

True, controlled heat may also help.

[@iamdarkyoshi]

@@JeffGeerling The glue they attach the IHS with doesn't really mind heat, I discovered this easy delid method when I superglued a heatsink to my pi 3B+ and needed to take it off to put it in a metal heatsink case It's quite effortless, I wasn't even trying to delid lol

[@JeffGeerling]

@@iamdarkyoshi Ha, "oops" as they say.

[@Psyden5757]

You shouldn't run the pi (or any processor) bare-die with nothing on it, since the temperature sensor won't be able to accurately get the temperature of the whole chip the silicon die itself doesn't do that good of a job transferring heat horizontally, so you could have really bad hotspots

[@Pngwolffman]

What infuriates me is there was almost certainly hardware encoding/decoding on the silicon, but Raspberry Pi disabled it! Hopefully this new stepping hasn't removed it and HOPEFULLY they will enable it so we can take advantage of it.

[@rudolfrainer]

Hey Jeff, do you have a link to the smart power outlets you often use to monitor power draw and remote control?

[@JeffGeerling]

They are ThirdReality Smart outlets (Zigbee)

[@rudolfrainer]

@@JeffGeerling Thanks!

[@Destide]

We can reignite those old liquid nitrogen videos where people tried to get Pentium 4's to 5GHZ

[@alsothejiraguy]

Congratulations on the new baby!

[@KOSMOS1701A]

i saw that glass is glass. anyway this is pretty cool and even though i don't own a pi, its interesting to see how it can still be optimized and improved.

[@empmachine]

Why not cool with an ice-bath? (you'd have to make ice from DI water, and ensure no minerals/etc.. kind of a drag.. I guess you could also coat it in a thin layer of sealant too).

[@thomasprade]

You should try desoldering the RAM chip from a 4 or 8 Gig Pi and slapping it onto the new chip ^^

[@JeffGeerling]

I'm considering an attempt at that! dosdude would be best at it of course :)

[@minigpracing3068]

Have you heard any news on CM5 and especially if it is pin compatible with CM4? Interested in using with Clockwork Pi Devterm or maybe their uConsole (if it ever ships). And congratulations! I saw your community post.

[@photoniccannon2117]

Given the significant reduction in power use, I'm very curious to see if the new chip stepping will make it into any of the 4GB or 8GB Pi models.

[@kikihun9726]

Maybe try to solder a 4 or 8 gig ram module to it. Congigurint it is easy as a resistor move

[@linuxguy1199]

I wonder if you could just dunk the entire pi in LN2, its certainly small enough, or mineral oil supercooled with dry ice.

[@jierenzheng7670]

I wonder if those are earlier yields and this new stepping might make it to another revision for the higher RAM models. Cool work!

[@davidbubble6863]

Congratz on your new baby! I wonder if they will update the 8GB version with new D0 CPU. Loving the efficiency of the new CPU.

[@DaHaiZhu]

It's always good to have options, but all I ever heard or read about RPi RAM was "more! We need 16GB!" I don't ever recall anyone asking for less...

[@BobSaget69]

1:16 I bet there has to be someone out there who has tried water-cooling their Raspberry Pi just because lol

[@thinlinx]

This is perfect for our TLXOS Thin Client and Digital Signage customers as TLXOS even runs OK on 512MB, a big thank you to Raspberry Pi!

[@jaybrooks1098]

the memory limitation is likely the gpu. more pixel pushed. The more ram needed. Jeff, with the die exposed. Will strobe lights cause the cpu to lock up?

[@gigabusterexe]

2GB pi is probably great for retro arch/batocera which usually have pretty low memory requirements

[@TheRealThisIsAlex]

Hi Jeff, I'm working on a project where I want to run an ALPR (Automatic License Plate Recognition) system on a Raspberry Pi 4 to trigger an autogate. I'm using a Mokose UC50 USB webcam for plate detection. Do you have any advice or resources on setting up the ALPR system, integrating it with the Raspberry Pi, and ensuring it works reliably for triggering the gate? Thanks for all the great content you share!

[@TradieTrev]

This is nuts Jeff for a bloke looking after a newborn!

[@PhilippBlum]

Smart move to put the sponsorship in the part where you delid the SoC.

[@arjungupta3531]

7:38 Oh god get out of my head I heard it in Zack's voice

[@puerlatinophilus3037]

Omg I'd love a JayzTwoCents XOC collab for the pi 5! Could 4Ghz on LN2 and possibly external voltage supply be possible?

[@JeffGeerling]

I think so, would require a good deal of bench time.

[@brianbutton6346]

Jeff, I note that at 6:30 the chart shows power draw for both the 4G and 8G unit to be the same, while both of them show a difference from the 2G unit. That leads me to conclude that the lower power draw with the 2G unit to be due to the CPU, not memory size. Am I wrong?

[@JeffGeerling]

Not necessarily; I think it could be explained by the silicon, but the only way to find out is to get a RAM chip swapped out!

[@Flapjck]

Would be cool if they use that extra space on a pi5B to squeeze in some extra cores. I’m assuming they can do that?

[@arpannaskar5758]

And they will charge 10 to 15$ more for that

[@yippy7951]

​@@arpannaskar5758That would be fine by me. Other SBCs running the more powerful RK3588 are also more expensive than the Pi 5. I would be nice to have a Pi model that has similar performance to those. Though the RK3588 has better power efficiency so I don't know if adding more cores to the Pi 5 would make the efficiency better or worse than it already is.

[@marcogenovesi8570]

it's like saying "it would be cool if they could use the extra space in the engine compartment to fit more cylinders" in your car. Yes they can do that, no they are not going to do that for free

[@waleedraza7195]

Nice little reference to JerryRigEverything in the captions

[@McTwistedTwisties]

2GB Pi5 with a WD MyBook makes great off site backup clients for my home nas at a family and friends place!

[@louwrentius]

If you don’t need the GPIO pins, dump the Pi’s and go for a mini pc / 1L pc with much more performance for the same idle power usage.

[@seanunderscorepry]

@7:30 this 3D printed desk fan mount can't not be a dig at Noctua's 'home' product line, haha

[@kushy_TV]

not really a jab when iirc noctua literally provides print files for their own home line of stuff

[@danagoyette7932]

Imagine if they'd built a variant of the board with both the RP1 ethernet and the on-chip ethernet. Might be nifty for a router, if you don't need >1 gigabit.

[@jukkapekkaylitalo]

it seems they made ram swap viable option by making resistor swap spot clearly visible. Jut go get 2 gig rasp5 and change 8 gig ram into it.

[@cameramaker]

The removal of 30% of the area is quite significant. Is it known which parts of the original BCM chip were not utilised and included in the new revision? I would say this is quite a different IC, not a minor stepping change. Please have the die shots compared, we are curious!

[@marcogenovesi8570]

probably some application-specific hardware accelerators

[@OriNachum]

Any expectations for a 32GB? I thinking running LLMs. Maybe faster RAM, too. I got the Hailo-8L but it’s not for LLMs, mostly vision which I have a very good utilization plan for.

[@tyttuut]

That pronunciation of "nanometer" hit me like a freight train.

[@mme725]

6:06 for anyone curious. I too was caught off guard lol

[@JeffGeerling]

Heh, my brain alternates between "Nanno meter" and "nan ometer" every time I say it.

[@OnnieKoski]

Yes! Listen to the power of the Red Shirt!

[@hyperverbal]

I would delid and use layers of Honeywell PTM7950 to level it out then out to the memory too ❤ then a heatpipe heatsink.

[@indiehandstudios5711]

it looked like you damaged the chip when you were delidding. wonder if that affected the test

[@boam2943]

This video left me wanting a Pi with a socket for RAM. Tiny BGA (or similar) socket for RAM or SODIMM?

[@JeffGeerling]

Would love socketed RAM!

[@rocksntwigs]

Sure, overclocking is fun, but how little power have you gotten a Pi to use? I'm trying to figure out if I can get a CM4 to use 1W while running.

[@markgeorge447]

power savings is power saving [and glass is glass]

[@lua-nya]

I sure could use the power reduction. I run off grid often.

[@webslinger2011]

Build a robot. Klipper for 3d printer. Could still be overkill for that.

[@Strawberrymaker]

Are the benchmark results similar for the old C1 revision?

[@Strawberrymaker]

Because that would mean that they need to put the RP1 also on the CM5 with the Ethernet controller removed? The CM4 uses the built in Ethernet controller

[@Great_White_Great_White]

I want to see Red Shirt Jeff push this thing to 4.5 GHz or BUST!

[@16kbytes]

Jeff, i think it would be interesting if you did a comparison of a rpi against a beagleboard beagley-ai

[@LuminairPrime]

Great technology! That means they're sticking with that chip for a long time. I think ~1W less power usage deserves some fanfare. But that also means, if YOU don't like that chip, it's time to move on. There are LOTS of ARM boards out there now with different pros and cons.

[@RichardFraser-y9t]

So, can we deduce this is the one mid cycle update we will get from version 5? Pi version 6 in a years time or are we looking at 2 years?

[@shadowarez1337]

Add some conformal coating around the die then add Liquid Metal and a nice copper base cooler should have better results. I have a 14900K Delidded liquid metal and Der8auers intel V1 Direct Die Contact frame its prob one of the few that wont suffer the degradation issues plagued by this generation of cpus.

[@KyalJames]

I just reached >90% certainty that I'd roll a n100 system soon instead of a pi5 because the pi5 isn't THAT much more efficient on power... Now this?!

[@RicardoRamosRetrocomputacao]

2GB of RAM is more than enough for most tasks a Pi is supposed to do. The problem is that with fast computers comes lazy coding tools, and even lazier programmers, JIT code instead of compiled code, and the incredible stupidity that has become a web browser, HTML, Javascript, etc... I see a few years from now, people needing 128GB of memory to render the Google search page, because some idiot in the future decided to build an AI in Javascript, and processors as fast as a Threadripper struggling to do this in real time.

[@bitcoinsig]

okay, now desolder and swap the memory module out of the d0 chip and see what happens

[@DeCapitanOG]

Why no liquid metal if you're already deciding?

[@KnurdMonkey]

Buy the 2Gb and get some memory module to upgrade it to 8.

[@shadowbanned4606]

3:45 what if an agency can just pry all of your data from single source?

[@WoodyWilliams]

I wanted to watch more of this vid but he summed-up the existence of the Pi5 2GB version -- beware! Most modern software want 4-8GB to run 😮

[@gatsbylee2773]

I prepare to pay extra for the higher memory regardless the use case because the memory can’t be extended later.

[@MirelRC]

Waiting for LN2 Extreme OC'ing on the Pi 5.

[@roxbinx4006]

Could you try something like high-performance clustering with the Raspberry Pi 5?

[@falxonPSN]

Wait, wait, wait. 6:06 Na-NAW-met-er? Never heard anyone pronounce it that way before. Must be a Canada thing. :)

[@laurentiuenulescu6893]

Congrats! Have you thought to upgrade a Pi to 16gb ram? Can be done?