The hot-running Raspberry Pi 4 now has a new firmware which tames its heat output a smidge by enabling power saving on the Via Labs VL805 USB 3.0 host controller chip — after developers fixed a flaw in an earlier build of the firmware which could cause selected USB 3.0 devices to perform incredibly slowly.
The Raspberry Pi 4 single-board computer is an impressive beast, with up to 4GB of RAM hanging off a quad-core 64-bit Arm Cortex-A72 CPU and shiny new Broadcom VideoCore VI GPU inside Broadcom’s custom-designed BCM2711B0 system-on-chip. Its power, however, comes at a price: As well as drawing more power than any of its predecessors, the board generates considerably more heat – enough, in fact, to hit the processor’s thermal throttle point and pull down its performance.
