Do you requirement a microcontroller that runs at 1 GHz? No, most likely not. however that didn’t stop [Visual Micro] from trying, as well as the results are quite interesting. Not only did the plucky bit chip not cook itself, it really seemed to run relatively well; with the already powerful microcontroller getting a significant increase in performance.

According to [Visual Micro] the Teensy 4.1, which typically has its ARM Cortex-M7 clocked at 600 MHz, can run at as much as 800 MHz without any type of extra cooling. however beyond that, you’ll want to invite some additional surface area to the party. It’s simple sufficient to cut a chunk out of an old CPU/GPU cooler as well as stick it on with a dab of thermal compound, however of program there’s no shortage of commercially offered heatsinks at this size that you might pick up cheap.

Cutting a customized heatsink.
With the heatsink installed, [Visual Micro] shows the Teensy running at around 62 °C during a benchmark. If that’s a bit hot for your liking, they likewise experimented with an old laptop cooler which knocked the chip down to an outstanding 38 °C while under load. It doesn’t look like a especially useful configuration to us, however at least the choice is there.

[Visual Micro] sadly doesn’t go into a great deal of detail about the benchmark results, however from what’s shown, it appears the overclock netted significant gains. A chart shows that in the time it took a stock Teensy to determine 15.2 million prime numbers, the overclocked chip handled to strike with 21.1 million. The timescale for this test is not promptly clear, however the enhancement is obvious.

Even at the stock 600 MHz, the Teensy 4 is a extremely powerful MCU. particularly after the 4.1 revitalize brought in support for extra peripherals as well as much more RAM. however we expect some people are never satisfied. got a job in mind that might benefit from an overclocked Teensy? We’d like to hear about it.

Thanks to [Zane] for the tip.