Raspberry Pi: Big Performance Boost with 100 Lines of Code

A software update promises a considerable increase in performance for the Raspberry Pi. Only a relatively short program code is required to implement the change.

The Raspberry Pi 5 is a very versatile single-board computer, mainly because of its extensive connectivity, and the significantly increased computing capacity compared to previous generations also plays a role. In the field of IT, it is not unusual for the performance of a platform to increase over time as a result of firmware updates and optimizations. This is exactly what has happened to the Raspberry Pi 5.

Behind the performance increase is a patch for the Linux kernel submitted by Tvrtko Ursulin. At around 100 lines of code, this is relatively short, but has a lot of offer in terms of the potential performance increase. Technically speaking, the firmware improves the memory management of the Raspberry Pi 5 by dividing the physical RAM into sub-areas, which basically allows the memory to be used more effectively.

Since this change relates to the RAM and not to the SSDs or eMMC storage, it has a direct impact on performance. In Geekbench, this results in a 6% increase in individual core performance. Multi-core performance increases by an impressive 20%. Such an increase in performance is highly significant and can make a big difference in certain applications. The new code is currently being reviewed and will likely be widely available soon. How much of the additional performance boost seen in the synthetic benchmarks will carry over to real-world applications also depends heavily on the specific usage scenario.