Raspberry Pi 4 Firmware Update: Significantly Reducing Power Consumption and Increasing Speed

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Compared to the previous generation, the recently launched Raspberry Pi 4 has brought many improvements: a more powerful CPU and GPU, larger memory, and support for Gigabit Ethernet and USB 3.0. However, stronger performance and processing power mean more power consumption, making the Raspberry Pi 4 the most power-hungry and heat-generating model in the series.

To address this issue, the official team has been continuously optimizing, and the recently released firmware update has finally shown significant improvements in power consumption. This firmware update includes USB controller, SDRAM, and VLI power management.

According to the official introduction, upgrading to the Raspberry Pi 4 Beta firmware brings many improvements, including finer control of SoC operating voltage and timing optimizations for the HDMI video state machine. The upgrade method is as follows:

First, open the terminal and enter the following commands:

sudo apt update
sudo apt full-upgrade

Then use the following command to restart:

sudo shutdown -r now

The Beta firmware reduces overall power consumption by lowering idle state power consumption while adjusting the SoC voltage under load without affecting performance. The final results are: idle power consumption reduced to 2.1W and load power consumption reduced to 6.41W, which is the best data to date. Reduced energy consumption also means less heat generation, improving heat dissipation, so the system can run at full power without thermal throttling.

Thermal imaging comparison

Power consumption comparison (the lower the value, the better)

As we can see, upgrading to the latest firmware will effectively reduce power consumption and improve heat dissipation.

Finally, the official team also introduced a “cool trick” for effective heat dissipation—adjusting the orientation of the Raspberry Pi 4, as shown in the following image:

The orientation shown in the image is to place the Raspberry Pi 4 with Beta firmware upright, with the GPIO module at the bottom and the power and HDMI ports at the top. This upright position improves convection, allowing surrounding air to absorb heat faster while lifting the board’s back from the insulating desktop, significantly increasing the available cooling surface area, thus improving heat dissipation compared to lying flat.

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