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The new Raspberry Pi 3 has been beefed up from the previous version. Now it comes with a Broadcom BCM2837, which is an ARM v8 quad-core Cortex-A53, clocked at 1.2GHz. I have also seen somewhere a recommendation for using a 2.5A power supply.

Does this imply an increased thermal output, hence increased cooling requirements?

This would have further implications in the cases that can be used for housing it.

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More information on this will be available as and when the units start arriving with purchasers and we get a clearer picture of overclocking capabilities and such. To the best of my knowledge the figures from the benchmarking done by the pimoroni.com blog are accurate:

In terms of CPU temperature, the Raspberry Pi 3 runs significantly hotter than the Pi 2. We used the following to measure peak CPU temperature while primes were being computed.

while true; do cat /sys/class/thermal/thermal_zone0/temp; sleep 1;
done

All three Pis idle at 36-38 degrees, and the Pi 3 gets up to a toasty 75 degrees while computing primes on four cores, compared with 52 degrees for the Pi 2 and 46 degrees on the Pi Zeros single core.

It's worth noting that these temperatures won't cause you any problems. The Raspberry Pi 3 will automatically throttle performance if the internal temperature of the SoC reaches around 82 degrees centigrade.

Chart showing Pi 3 temperature benchmark readings

With these figures in mind I'd say you might, if you were planning on throwing a lot of hard number crunching at your Pi, need some kind of cooling to prevent thermal throttling. Under normal conditions I don't think it would be anything to worry about.

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