Raspberry Pi Pico Overclocking, beware there is a catch!

[@kaypope1581]

Awesome compilation of info including nice graphs!

[@daCount0]

Very underrated channel about raspi-pico.

[@tuberroot1112]

Some great content here. Hwvr, the setup_default_uart() tip no longer seems to work: pico_stdlib/stdlib.c:110: undefined reference to `stdio_uart_init' Has the pico lib changed since you looked this?

[@ComputerScienceSimplified]

Awesome video, keep up the great work! :)

[@robingrosset6941]

Thanks, will do!

[@zetaconvex1987]

Tell us more about the reset button you have wired up there.

[@saifulrizal3382]

cool review! Thanks

[@Buoy2]

Thanks for this! It should be noted that there are other peripherals than flash that might become limiting factors. I could only get my program to work up to 300 Mhz, after that I started getting wrong data from the PIO buffers.

[@RDCST]

Thanks. I come here for the power consumption test but the OC tables are interesting too.

[@himselfe]

420Mhz is pretty crazy! Would like to see what the temperatures are like at various clock speeds.

[@KarstenJohansson]

At 420, it is blazing! Okay, I'll see myself out, now.

[@Nobody-Nowhere]

teensy 4 goes up to 1ghz

[@johnbiscuit8272]

@@Nobody-Nowhere teensy in my country is like 10 times the price of the pico...

[@urnoob5528]

@@Nobody-Nowhere 10 times the price for 3 times the frequency, good job

[@bfbunny]

@@urnoob5528 To be honest, you can't really compare the processors' performance just with the difference in frequency, as they are built on very different architectures and are equipped with different memory sizes. The teensy wins big with its Cortex-M7 as opposed to the pi pico's Cortex-M0+.

[@stevenp8810]

Excellent work! This may come in handy when I mess around with trying to make an MP3 player based on the RP2040 :)

[@TrickyNekro]

Small guess here, it´s probably using the clock frequency divided by 2 as an SPI frequency to talk to the flash memory. That´s probably hard-coded, do not know if you can change it and potentially you are "overclocking" the SPI interface of that little flash also at ~300MHz.

[@robingrosset6941]

Yeah, you are right. You can increase the divider in a custom boot stage2 with PICO_FLASH_SPI_CLKDIV=4.. just learned this yesterday after I posted the video. Might have to do a follow up!

[@mr1enrollment]

It would be interesting to investigate how fast you could clock a PIO pin and create a counter. That is: if you create a counter from a PIO pin input, the what is the max rate?

Isn't possible to set SPI clock as its own too (independent of the CPU clock), or is it always tied to the CPU clock?

[@robingrosset6941]

Its a good thought. I don't know is the answer. I think its worth trying to figure it out so you could get highest CPU overclock AND have flash access. Also wondering about SD card clock speeds and if the same thing would happen.

[@crestdazoltral7705]

@@robingrosset6941 The QSPI baud rate is configured by a a clock divider dividing the clock by at least two which is the divider you want at normal frequencies, but the BootROM contains a slow fallback configuration function which among other things configures a divider of six instead of two. Reconfiguring the QSPI peripheral using the BootROM functions is probably the easiest way to try restoring (slow) flash access to an overclocked RP2040. For optimal speed you could try a divider of 3 resulting in 140MHz QSPI clock which overclocks the flash as well but to less than a 300MHz overclock with a divider of two resulting in a 150MHz QSPI clock.

[@jakesllama]

Thanks for the awesome help! Please do you have a link to the benchmarking code?

[@R4C3R]

Thank you for the video! I'm looking to overclock the RPi Pico to around 250MHz using the Arduino IDE. Can you maybe share the sketch that you used to do the tests?

[@exosdel]

Great video!

[@KarstenJohansson]

Power draw is the important measure. You can go real fast if you put in a car battery. So hopefully someone will make a video with that in there, too.

[@robingrosset6941]

I covered uncooled max and min power draw previously here... kzbin.info/www/bejne/fWOlpqJ8g7Gieq8 The chart shows current draw on the 5V rail (measured as 5.05v) you can infer power draw across the full range or clock speeds. The maximum is 340mW at 420MHz the minimum is 23mW at 16MHz.

[@KarstenJohansson]

@@robingrosset6941 Thanks. That was me being dumb by commenting before the video was through. ;p A project I'm working on doesn't need much speed, but battery life is more important. Will be interesting to see what balance I will be able to find between the two. That's a lot of range available.

[@kaiyofox]

320mhz is where I found my flash stops working. but I also found providing more voltage, you can go further. (But my "Pico" is builtinto another device) RP2040 processor

[@atonduke7612]

Huh. 0.85 V works for me even above 125 MHz. What I guess you (and other people) didn't do is disable or lower the threshold of brown-out detect. That's what's actually happened to me the first time around and I quickly figured it out from having read the RP2040 datasheet. Though I had to do it by manually writing to the relevant register.

[@robingrosset6941]

Nice thanks for the tip I just got a Pico W so I might see if it works on that.

[@augustzuanich3338]

The top speed seems to vary for me. I have 2 PICOs and one maxes out at 300mhz and the other at 310mhz.

[@fordnox7150]

420 is pretty sussy number, but well done. It's super amazing that you can get 420MHz for only 1$.. .-.

[@ElTurbandito]

What is the purpose of the 3.3V FTDI adapter? Does this overclock prevent serial communication via the regular onboard microusb?

[@TT-it9gg]

Thanks for the part1 and part2 YT clips. Very helpful. Just ran the CoreMark on the 816Mhz Teensy 4.0 w/o heatsink. The score is 3368.89 It's about 4 times faster than 420Mhz Pico with fansink. And you may push the Teensy to over 1Ghz with fansink if you like. BTW, since the Pico is dual-core, how about CoreMark Pro results?

[@eFeXuy]

Gonna need to get the Pico water cooled now?

[@AnthonyBall]

The max UART baud rate is documented at 900Kbit/s, do you know id overclocking 2x (250Mhz) - does this max baud rate also increase to 1800Kbit/s ?

[@kuzipa9126]

Does overclocking the RP2040 affect the peripherals, i.e, Is it able to generate higher frequency PWM signals with greater resolution?

[@marc-andreservant201]

Interestingly, the CPU by itself is only specified to 133MHz in its datasheet, so you can't just buy faster QSPI flash and increase the frequency. Well you can, but it will void your warranty.

[@fano72]

300mhz with fpu should be enough for a polyphonic synth

[@Techn0man1ac]

Почти пол гигагерца, Карл. Никакой Arduino это даже и не снилось

[@abelyarlindsey8386]

и 2 ядра, кстати.

[@9A4GEMilan]

This thing is so slow in Arduino mode. Slower than Arduino nano. I am deeply disappointed.