Raspberry Pi 4 gets new firmware to lower temperature

The Raspberry Pi Foundation has released new firmware to lower the temperatures of the Pi 4. According to reviews, the device suffers from high temperatures. A news site testing the firmware says the firmware lowers temperatures by 3 to 5 degrees Celsius.

News site CNX-Software says it has received the test firmware from the Foundation, because it previously wrote about the heat problems of the Pi 4, among other things. This new firmware includes “thermal optimizations” for the VIA VL805 pci-e usb 3.0 controller onboard the Pi 4, according to the Foundation. According to the news site, the firmware enables active-state power management, or aspm, which should help to to reduce temperatures.

CNX Software has tested the new firmware, in an office room with a temperature of 28 degrees Celsius, the temperature loss would be 3 to 5 degrees. In idle the temperature goes from 65 degrees Celsius with the old firmware, to 61 degrees Celsius with the test software. Benchmarks with 7-zip also indicate a lower temperature, from 75 degrees to 70 degrees Celsius. With the new firmware, the Pi 4 also achieves higher scores in 7-zip benchmarks, according to CNX Software, which could indicate that the processor suffers less from throttling.

The Raspberry Pi 4 was announced last week and includes a Cortex A72 quadcore, USB 3.0 connections and 1 to 4GB of RAM. However, reviews of the minicomputer from TrustedReviews and ITPro, for example, note that the device gets quite warm. This causes the processor to throttle and performance decreases. The new firmware should reduce the risk of throttling.

The firmware can be downloaded from the Raspberry Pi forum, although the site appears to be unavailable at the time of writing. Under the article from CNX Software, reader tkaiser writes that the firmware update has a negative impact on the read and write speeds of the Pi 4. This may be a bug and the software is therefore not yet stable.