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Comment by laumars | Hacker News Reader

"hacky" is the right word. This is one of the poorer guides to installing a Raspberry Pi 3 fan.

The cynic in me also finds it slightly amusing that Microsoft complain about the Pi constantly overheating when it works just fine for the vast majority of other users. Heck, even the gaming community (eg RetroPi) often overclock this thing with little more than a heat sink. I think it just goes to show that there is still a lot of work required to get Windows down to the same footprint as Linux.

Still, at least Microsoft are embracing the Raspberry Pi. :)

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And yours is one of the poorer reactions to the guide.

"when it works just fine for the vast majority of other users"

The vast majority of other users DO NOT utilize all four cores at 100% for prolonged times.

Also, the very small niche subset that actually do, will in the absolute vast majority of cases not notice the that the PI has reduced the clock frequency in order to remain stable.

The heatsink used is in the article is a quite poor heatsink but even that managed to keep everything in check in these situations.

How on earth does the footprint have anything to do with this? (nevermind that they do run linux) If anything a greater footprint might have suggested poorer utilization which from a hardware and overheating scenario is a positive.

Pi's are generally underclocked to reduce heat (not stability, they're usually stable when overclocked providing you're pushing enough amps to the unit), so yes you're right that most users wouldn't be running all four cores at 100% for prolonged use. In fact you're touching on another point I raised[1] that there are better dev boards for this kind of workload.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15489271

And the reason for throttling to reduce heat is to maintain stability and not damage anything. Otherwise it wouldn't have mattered if the CPU went to 200c.

Sorry I meant to say "power draw" (too late to edit but the part when I said "stable when overclocked providing you're pushing enough amps to the unit" should have been a clue).

It should also be noted that the examples you gave were not heat related stability issues. The random crashes and USB devices not working symptoms are due to the device being starved of power due to the increased power requirement of the overclocked ARM and people using power adapters based solely on the voltage rating rather than checking what amps it can push.

The Raspberry Foundation blogged about underclocking it's ARM chip to reduce the required power draw rather than preventing it from overheating. This was with the first release of the Pi - back when they ran a single core ARM CPU. But the same problems are evidenced by your example of USB devices failing to function despite the ARM chip still running full speed (when the Pi's CPU overheats it should throttle itself). In fact you can "overclock" the Pi even without a heatsink if you use the right power adapter. Though obviously the harder you push the chip, the more you'll want cooling so it doesn't self throttle nor do more damage.

Anyway, to go back to the point you're ignoring: if raw CPU grunt is your end goal then the Pi isn't really the right dev board for the job - overclocked or not.

What? I have not given any such examples. That is a straw man.

You entirely correct that underclocking has been used to gain stability issues that have been caused by poor power supplies. But has nothing to do with throttling, heat related issues or this article.

I'm "ignoring" that because I have not (and I have not seen anyone else) suggested that raw CPU grunt is the end goal...

I would have imagined the end goal for this particular use case is availability. Microsoft want's people to play with their solutions and the reason to target the Pi is because of availability and familiarity at a very low price point. It is the single most popular and accessible device they could have adapted this project for. For that purpose I can not imagine any better hardware than the Raspberry Pi.

> What? I have not given any such examples. That is a straw man.

Sorry it must have been someone elses post. Full of cold at the moment so bare with me :-/

> You entirely correct that underclocking has been used to gain stability issues that have been caused by poor power supplies. But has nothing to do with throttling, heat related issues or this article.

I wasn't suggesting that either. I think we are both arguing the same points badly tbh.

> I would have imagined the end goal for this particular use case is availability.

That was my assumption as well but I think their approach is a little confusing. They talk about the ELL framework being designed for "resource constrained platforms and small single-board computers, like Raspberry Pi, Arduino, and micro:bit." yet then go on to discuss appending a fan to the Pi in a way that kind of defeat the purpose of running a Pi. It makes it very confusing when read any one of their articles in isolation as I had done initially.

In any case, it's good to see Microsoft continuing to support Linux.

What does Windows have to do with it? Their instructions use Raspbian: https://microsoft.github.io/ELL/tutorials/Setting-up-your-Ra...

That is a different guide and Microsoft have released other guides on installing Windows on the Pi 3 plus this guide did include an embedded screen so while I do take your point I hope you can see how it's an easy assumption to make that they were running Windows.

I'm actually quite impressed they were even recommending Rasbian actually. They wouldn't have done that 5 or 10 years ago.

uh, the post literally has "To measure processor temperature, use the command watch /opt/vc/bin/vcgencmd measure_temp" in it, that doesn't look like windows to me.

> running a compute-intensive AI model

On a slight tangent, I do wonder if the Raspberry Pi is the right dev board for running compute-intensive AI models. It is cheap but the real hero of the Pi is the Broadcom SoC. Where as there are other dev boards out there - lots of them in fact - which would have a faster CPU, dedicated ethernet bus (even gigabit ethernet - which would be better for clustering too), etc.

I do love my Pis (I have a few of them) but if you're having to overclock the thing and then strap on a CPU fan to make the Pi even viable for running compute-intensive AI models then perhaps the exercise might have been better suited for running on another piece of hardware instead?

FPGA comes to mind. I think AWS has the right idea with cloud based FPGA programming.

I see general IA coming first in the form of many neural networks working together. Being able to optimize each sector for its own processing needs seems like both the most power efficient and performance optimal solution.

I don’t know anything about this stuff though.

> I think it just goes to show that there is still a lot of work required to get Windows down to the same footprint as Linux.

... huh? They're not running Windows on these Pi's, are they? Nothing in the article indicates that they are, and the fact that they tell you to monitor temperatures with `watch /opt/vc/bin/vcgencmd measure_temp` strongly implies that they're not.

Yeah the mount just leaves it hanging. It will likely be noisy. Why not properly anchor the fan in all four corners? It could still mount to the rpi with two screws.

The fan's frame is plenty strong to hold it up. The only issue I see is that a baffle or case would better direct the air, allowing a lower speed fan. However, the amount of air movement required here is exceedingly small already, as can be seen by their fanless heatsink already meeting the 85C requirement.

>The cynic in me also finds it slightly amusing that Microsoft complain about the Pi constantly overheating

The cynic in me will be monitoring the news to see if MS releases a competitor (FPGA-based?) to the RPi in the near future.

That wouldn't surprise me. They want to claw some developer mindshare back, they started with the Linux subsystem for windows, a SBC may be the next step.

And their RPi competitor could even evolve into a phone!

The RetroPi stuff is probably single-threaded. If they were pushing all cores to 100%, they'd probably have issues too.

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