Cybersecurity & cyberwarfare on Nostr: Pico Gets a Speed Bump The release notes for the 2.1.1 Raspberry Pi Pico SDK have a ...
Pico Gets a Speed Bump
The release notes for the 2.1.1 Raspberry Pi Pico SDK have a late holiday present: The RP2040 chip is now certified to run at 200 MHz if you use at least 1.15V as the supply voltage.
Previously, the certified speed was 125 MHz, although it was well-known you could overclock the device. By default, the 125 MHz figure is still what you’ll get, though. If you want a higher frequency, you need to set SYS_CLK_MHZ to 200 or even 250 before doing a build.
They hint that more speed increases may happen in the future. If you want do go as fast as they’ll allow, you can set PICO_USE_FASTEST_SUPPORTED_CLOCK=1 instead. This will always pick the highest frequency which is currently 250 MHz.
There are other updates, too, of course. We noted several bug fixes and a new version of TinyUSB. There are also some new examples, including a few that they forgot to mention in version 2.1.0. We were particularly interested in the mqtt examples, a PIO/DMA UART example, and the multi CDC USB example, something we’ve struggled to work around before on other projects.
So what will you do with a faster Pico? We doubt we are going to see a practical 1 GHz overclock. The emphasis is on the word practical. But we have seen 312 MHz.
hackaday.com/2025/02/20/pico-g…
The release notes for the 2.1.1 Raspberry Pi Pico SDK have a late holiday present: The RP2040 chip is now certified to run at 200 MHz if you use at least 1.15V as the supply voltage.
Previously, the certified speed was 125 MHz, although it was well-known you could overclock the device. By default, the 125 MHz figure is still what you’ll get, though. If you want a higher frequency, you need to set SYS_CLK_MHZ to 200 or even 250 before doing a build.
They hint that more speed increases may happen in the future. If you want do go as fast as they’ll allow, you can set PICO_USE_FASTEST_SUPPORTED_CLOCK=1 instead. This will always pick the highest frequency which is currently 250 MHz.
There are other updates, too, of course. We noted several bug fixes and a new version of TinyUSB. There are also some new examples, including a few that they forgot to mention in version 2.1.0. We were particularly interested in the mqtt examples, a PIO/DMA UART example, and the multi CDC USB example, something we’ve struggled to work around before on other projects.
So what will you do with a faster Pico? We doubt we are going to see a practical 1 GHz overclock. The emphasis is on the word practical. But we have seen 312 MHz.
hackaday.com/2025/02/20/pico-g…