I got almost all of my wishes granted with RP2350

https://dmitry.gr/?r=06.%20Thoughts&proj=11.%20RP2350

by elipsitz • 2 years ago

700 341 2 years ago

elipsitz• 2 years ago

Can’t find an official announcement or datasheet yet, but according to this post:

* 2x Cortex-M33F * improved DMA * more and improved PIO * external PSRAM support * variants with internal flash (2MB) and 80 pins (!) * 512KiB ram (double) * some RISC-V cores? Low power maybe?

Looks like a significant jump over the RP2040!

zrail2• 2 years ago

This is pretty exciting. Can't wait for the datasheet!

dave78• 2 years ago

Pico 2, using the 2350, seems to be announced:

https://www.raspberrypi.com/products/raspberry-pi-pico-2/

jsheard4• 2 years ago

Only $1 more than the original Pico, that's an absolute steal. Although the Pico2 doesn't have PSRAM onboard so there's room for higher end RP235x boards above it.

HeyLaughingBoy8• 2 years ago

Make one in an Arduino Uno form factor and double the price and they'd make a killing :-)

I try to dissuade n00bs from starting their arduino journey with the ancient AVR-based devices, but a lot of the peripherals expect to plug into an Uno.

repelsteeltje• 2 years ago

... And RP2354A/B even has 2MB built in flash!

andylinpersonal3• 2 years ago

Indeed an in-package winbond flash die though.

KaiserPro3• 2 years ago

I'm hoping that its got much better power management. That would be really cool for me.

dgacmu2• 2 years ago

Small (0.5 bits effective) improvement to the ADC also, per the datasheet.

jsheard4• 2 years ago

Speak of the devil: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41156743

Very nice that the "3" turned out to mean the modern M33 core rather than the much older M3 core. It has a real FPU!

dmitrygr9• 2 years ago

Yes, well-guessed

zedcombination• 2 years ago

Yes, it's pretty lame that Raspberry Pi has such a "flexible" definition of "low power". i.e. the RP2350 is not low power at all.

Looks like Espressif will keep getting my business. What a missed opportunity by RPI.

RA2lover2• 2 years ago

Is there any info on the analog capabilities compared to the RP2040?

TomWhitwell• 2 years ago

Looks like 4 x ADC channels again, no on-board DAC

RA2lover2• 2 years ago

the 80-pin version has 8.

limpbizkitfan4• 2 years ago

Is there an exhaustive list of stm32h7 errata? Has anyone compiled a defect list?

dmitrygr9• 2 years ago

STM has an inexhaustible list of them, but does not list at least a few QSPI ones that I am aware of. :/

limpbizkitfan4• 2 years ago

:( hoping to play with a pico 2 soon so I can convince my team to move off stm32h7

uticus2• 2 years ago

Apart from official ST documentation [0]?

For comparison, RP2350 errata in Appendix E of [1]

[0] https://www.st.com/en/microcontrollers-microprocessors/stm32...

[1] https://datasheets.raspberrypi.com/rp2350/rp2350-datasheet.p...

zrail2• 2 years ago

Looks like the SDK got updated a couple hours ago:

https://github.com/raspberrypi/pico-sdk/commit/efe2103f9b284...

blackkat• 2 years ago

Some specs here: https://www.digikey.ca/en/product-highlight/r/raspberry-pi/r...

Based on the RP2350, designed by Raspberry Pi in the United Kingdom

Dual Arm M33s at 150 MHz with FPU

520 KiB of SRAM

Robust security features (signed boot, OTP, SHA-256, TRNG, glitch detectors and Arm TrustZone for Cortex®-M)

Optional, dual RISC-V Hazard3 CPUs at 150 MHz

Low-power operation

PIO v2 with 3 × programmable I/O co-processors (12 × programmable I/O state machines) for custom peripheral support

Support for PSRAM, faster off-chip XIP QSPI Flash interface

4 MB on-board QSPI Flash storage

5 V tolerant GPIOs

Open source C/C++ SDK, MicroPython support

Software-compatible with Pico 1/RP2040

Drag-and-drop programming using mass storage over USB

Castellated module allows soldering directly to carrier boards

Footprint- and pin-compatible with Pico 1 (21 mm × 51 mm form factor)

26 multifunction GPIO pins, including three analog inputs

Operating temperature: -20°C to +85°C

Supported input voltage: 1.8 VDC to 5.5 VDC

synergy202• 2 years ago

Wow, can't wait. Love the 5V GPIO and security features.

Daneel_• 2 years ago

5V GPIO is a huge deal for me - this immediately opens up a huge range of integrations without having to worry about line level conversion.

I can’t wait to use this!

my1234• 2 years ago

Hazard3 RTL: https://github.com/Wren6991/Hazard3

IshKebab2• 2 years ago

I wonder how well it's been verified.

moffkalast4• 2 years ago

Low-power operation

Low power suspend? In a Pi Foundation product? Impossible.

thomasdeleeuw• 2 years ago

Not sure why this is downvoted but the sleep and dormant pico examples have quite some issues, they are still in "extras" and not in "core", so while documentation of features is my personal favorite aspect of the pico, there is room for improvement here still.

coder5435• 2 years ago

I'm having trouble seeing where the datasheet actually says the GPIO pins are 5V tolerant.

EDIT: okay, section 14.8.2.1 mentions two types of digital pins: "Standard Digital" and "Fault Tolerant Digital", and the FT Digital pins might be 5V tolerant, it looks like.

sowbug2• 2 years ago

Page 13: "GPIOs are 5 V-tolerant (powered), and 3.3 V-failsafe (unpowered)"

jayyhu3• 2 years ago

Edit: See comment below; The RP2350 can be powered by a 5V supply.

giantg2• 2 years ago

I'd rather have it run on the lower voltage - generally easier to step down than buck up. Either way, the modules are pretty cheap, small, and easy to find.

skykooler• 2 years ago

How much tolerance does that have - can it run directly off a 3.7v lithium ion battery?

Findecanor3• 2 years ago

To clarify: You can connect a 5V power source by connecting it to the VSYS pin which leads into the on-board voltage regulator.

But the µC itself runs on 3.3V and is not totally 5V-capable. You'd need level converters to interface with 5V.

maccam912• 2 years ago

Can anyone speak about plans for a Pico 2 W (or Pico W 2)? I've been playing around recently with mine and even just syncing with the current time over wifi opens up a lot of possibilities.

coder5435• 2 years ago

Jeff Geerling said the Pico 2 W is coming later this year: https://youtu.be/oXF_lVwA8A4?t=445

MarcScott• 2 years ago

It's in this post - https://www.raspberrypi.com/news/raspberry-pi-pico-2-our-new...

katzinsky• 2 years ago

I suppose this isn't the first time a company that started out as a hobbiest board manufacturer produced really amazing micro controllers but man is it insane how far they've knocked the ball out of the park.

synergy202• 2 years ago

You can pick either ARM cores or RISC-V cores on the same die? Never saw design like this before. Will this impact price and power consumption?

"The Hazard3 cores are optional: Users can at boot time select a pair of included Arm Cortex-M33 cores to run, or the pair of Hazard3 cores. Both options run at 150 MHz. The more bold could try running one RV and one Arm core together rather than two RV or two Arm.

Hazard3 is an open source design, and all the materials for it are here. It's a lightweight three-stage in-order RV32IMACZb* machine, which means it supports the base 32-bit RISC-V ISA with support for multiplication and division in hardware, atomic instructions, bit manipulation, and more."

bri3d• 2 years ago

This "switchable cores" thing has been appearing in some products for a few years now, for example Sipeed SG2002 (LicheeRV). The area occupied by the actual instruction core is usually pretty small compared to peripherals and internal memories.

zer00eyz• 2 years ago

The MilkV Duo also has this feature I believe... https://milkv.io/duo

geerlingguy5• 2 years ago

Apparently (this is news to me), you can also choose to run 1+1 Arm/RISC-V, you don't have to switch both cores either/or.

Eben Upton: "They're selectable at boot time: Each port into the bus fabric can be connected either to an M33 or a Hazard3 via a mux. You can even, if you're feeling obtuse, run with one of each."

Source: https://www.theregister.com/2024/08/08/pi_pico_2_risc_v/

ravetcofx• 2 years ago

But not 2+2? That seems too bad to have each architecture run code based on their strengths for quad core workloads.

jaeckel2• 2 years ago

Would've been cool for safety applications if the second core could be run in lockstep mode.

jononor2• 2 years ago

This seems like a great way to test the waters before a potential full-on transition to RISC-V. It allows to validate both technically and market reception, for a much lower cost than taping out a additional chip.

MBCook• 2 years ago

Fun for benchmarking too.

You’re limited to those two exact kinds of cores, but you know every other thing on the entire computer is 100% identical.

It’s not SBC 1 vs SBC 2, but they have different RAM chips and this one has a better cooler but that one better WiFi.

GordonS• 2 years ago

My thoughts exactly - a risc-free (hurhur) way to get RISC-V in the hands of many, many devs.

kelnos• 2 years ago

I do wonder if the unavailability of some of the security features and -- possibly a big deal for some applications -- the accelerated floating point on the RISC-V cores would skew that experiment, though.

askvictor• 2 years ago

Indeed, though I'm curious about the rationale behind it. It is a 'plan B' in case their relationship with ARM sours? It is aiming for cost-cutting in the future (I can't imagine the ARM licences are costing them much given the price of the RP2040, but maybe they're absorbing it to get marketshare)

GeorgeTirebiter4• 2 years ago

Hazard3 pointer https://github.com/Wren6991/Hazard3

I think it's cool as a cucumber that we can choose fully open-source RISC-V if we want. My guess is the RV cores are slower clock-per-clock than the M33 cores; that is benchmark scores for M33's will be better, as Hazard3 is only 3-stage pipeline - but so is M33. Can't wait for the benchmarks.

numpad0• 2 years ago

https://www.raspberrypi.com/products/rp2350/

4 variants? "A" and "B" variants in QFN60 and QFN80, "2350" and "2354" variants with and without 2MB Flash. CPU can be switched between dual RISC-V @ 150MHz or dual Cortex-M33 @ 300MHz by software or in one-time programming memory(=permanently).

Datasheet, core switching details, most of docs are 404 as of now; I guess they didn't have embargo date actually written in `crontab`.

e: and datasheet is up!

doe_eyes3• 2 years ago

I think it's a good way to introduce these chips, and it's a great project, but the author's (frankly weird) beef with STM32H7 is detracting from the point they're trying to make:

So, in conclusion, go replan all your STM32H7 projects with RP2350, save money, headaches, and time.

STM32H7 chips can run much faster and have a wider selection of peripherals than RP2350. RP2350 excels in some other dimensions, including the number of (heterogenous) cores. Either way, this is nowhere near apples-to-apples.

Further, they're not the only Cortex-M7 vendor, so if the conclusion is that STM32H7 sucks (it mostly doesn't), it doesn't follow that you should be instead using Cortex-M33 on RPi. You could be going with Microchip (hobbyist-friendly), NXP (preferred by many commercial buyers), or a number of lesser-known manufacturers.

dmitrygr9• 2 years ago

1. Nobody has a wider selection of peripherals than a chip with 3 PIOs.

2. And my beef is personal - I spent months (MONTHS of my life) debugging the damn H7, only to find a set of huge bugs in the main reason I had been trying to use it (QSPI ram support), showed it to the manufacturer, and had them do nothing. Later they came back and, without admitting i was right about the bugs, said that "another customer is seeing same issues, what was the workaround you said found?" I told them that i'll share the workaround when they admit the problem. Silence since.

I fully reserve the right to be pissy at shitty companies in public on my website!

doe_eyes3• 2 years ago

I'm not arguing you can't be angry with them, I'm just saying that to me, it detracts from the point about the new platform. Regarding #1, I'm sure you know that peripherals in the MCU world mean more than just digital I/O. Further, even in the digital domain, the reason PIO isn't more popular is that most people don't want to DIY complex communication protocols.

uticus2• 2 years ago

[edit: I retract this, I see you’ve had secretly in your possession to play with for over a year. You lucky dog. ]

I have been anti-recommending STM’s chips to everyone for a few years now due to STM’s behaviour with regards to the clearly-demonstrated-to-them hardware issues.

You certainly reserve the right. However it is unclear to me why the recommendation to complaints over a months-long period is a product that has just been released.

Trying to ask in a very unbiased way since as a hobbyist I’m looking into ST, Microchip, and RP2040. For my part I’ve had two out of four RP2040 come to me dead on arrival, as part of two separate boards from different vendors - one being Pi Pico from Digilent. Not a ton of experience with Microchip but I hear they have their own problems. Nobody’s perfect, the question is how do the options compare.

151553• 2 years ago

1. Nobody has a wider selection of peripherals than a chip with 3 PIOs.

NXP FlexIO says "Hello!"

Archit3ch• 2 years ago

STM32H7 chips can run much faster

STM32H7 tops out at 600MHz. This has 2x 300MHz at 2-3 cycles/op FP64. So maybe your applications can fit into this?

spacedcowboy6• 2 years ago

I'm seeing several statements of 2x300MHz, but the page [1] says 2x150MHz M33's..

I know the RP2040's overclock a lot but these are significantly more complex chips, it seems less likely they'll overclock to 2x the base frequency.

[1] https://www.raspberrypi.com/news/raspberry-pi-pico-2-our-new...

151553• 2 years ago

The STM32H7 and other M7 chips have caches - performance is night and day between 2x300MHz smaller, cacheless cores and chips with L1 caches (and things like TCM, etc.)

The SRAM in that H7 is running at commensurately-high speeds, as well.

Comparing an overclocked 2xM33 to a non-overclocked M7 is also probably a little inaccurate - that M7 will easily make more than the rated speed (not nearly as much as the RP2040 M0+, though.)

mordae• 2 years ago

It's 6 cycles for dadd/dsub, 16 for dmul, 51 for ddiv.

adrian_b• 2 years ago

As other posters have mentioned, this has 2 Cortex-M33 cores @ 150 MHz, not @ 300 MHz.

Cortex-M7 is in a different size class than Cortex-M33, it has a speed about 50% greater at the same clock frequency and it is also available at higher clock frequencies.

Cortex-M33 is the replacement for the older Cortex-M4 (while Cortex-M23 is the replacement for Cortex-M0+ and Cortex-M85 is the modern replacement for Cortex-M7).

While for a long time the Cortex-M MCUs had been available in 3 main sizes, Cortex-M0+, Cortex-M4 and Cortex-M7, for their modern replacements there is an additional size, Cortex-M55, which is intermediate between Cortex-M33 and Cortex-M85.

limpbizkitfan4• 2 years ago

ST is a zillion dollar company that should be hiring the talent capable of delivering product that match the features in their sales pamphlets. Integration is tricky but a company with STs deep pockets should be able to root cause or at least help troubleshoot an issue, not ask for a fix like some nepotism hire.

HeyLaughingBoy8• 2 years ago

They should also be hiring people that can write clearly in their datasheets, but here we are, so...

doe_eyes3• 2 years ago

I'm not an ST fanboy and they're not a vendor I use, but they are very popular in the 32-bit Cortex-M space, so they're clearly doing something right. Meanwhile, companies like Microchip that put effort into accessible documentation and tooling are getting table scraps.

kaycebasques5• 2 years ago

Official news post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41192341

Official product page: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41192269

kjagiello• 2 years ago

Datasheet: https://datasheets.raspberrypi.com/rp2350/rp2350-datasheet.p...

dang• 2 years ago

Thanks! Macroexpanded:

Raspberry Pi Pico 2, our new $5 microcontroller board, on sale now - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41192341 - Aug 2024 (71 comments)

jonathrg• 2 years ago

Can someone explain the benefit of having essentially 4 cores (2 ARM + 2 RISC-V) on the chip but only having 2 able to run simultaneously? Does this take significantly less die space than having all 4 available at all times?

coder5435• 2 years ago

Coordinating access to the memory bus and peripherals is probably not easy to do when the cores weren’t ever designed to work together. Doing so could require a power/performance penalty at all times, even though most users are unlikely to want to deal with two completely different architectures across four cores on one microcontroller.

Having both architectures available is a cool touch. I believe I criticized the original RP2040 for not being bold enough to go RISC-V, but now they’re offering users the choice. I’ll be very curious to see how the two cores compare… I suspect the ARM cores will probably be noticeably better in this case.

swetland2• 2 years ago

They actually let you choose one Cortex-M33 and one RISC-V RV32 as an option (probably not going to be a very common use case) and support atomic instructions from both cores.

dmitrygr9• 2 years ago

cores are high bandwidth bus masters. Making a crossbar that supports 5 high bandwidth masters (4x core + dma) is likely harder, larger, and higher power than one that supports 3.

ebenupton11• 2 years ago

It's actually 10 masters (I+D for 4 cores + DMA read + DMA write) versus 6 masters. Or you could pre-arbitrate each pair of I and each pair of D ports. But even there the timing impact is unpalatable.

blihp• 2 years ago

Beyond the technical reasons for the limit, it provides for a relatively painless way to begin to build out/for RISC-V[1] without an uncomfortable transition. For those who just want a better next iteration of the controller, they have it. For those who build tools, want to A/B test the architectures, or just do whatever with RISC-V, they have that too. All without necessarily setting the expectation that both will continue to coexist long term.

[1] While it's possible they are envisioning dual architecture indefinitely, it's hard to imagine why this would be desirable long term esp. when one architecture can be royalty free and the other not, power efficiency, paying for dark silicon etc.

networked• 2 years ago

I see a business decision here. Arm cores have licensing fees attached to them. Arm is becoming more restrictive with licensing and wants to capture more value [1]:

The Financial Times has a report on Arm's "radical shake-up" of its business model. The new plan is to raise prices across the board and charge "several times more" than it currently does for chip licenses. According to the report, Arm wants to stop charging chip vendors to make Arm chips, and instead wants to charge device makers—especially smartphone manufacturers—a fee based on the overall price of the final product.

Even if the particular cores in the RP2350 aren't affected, the general trend is unfavorable to Arm licensees. Raspberry Pi has come up with a clever design that allows it to start commoditizing its complement [2]: make the cores a commodity that is open-source or available from any suitable RISC-V chip designer instead of something you must go to Arm for. Raspberry Pi can get its users accustomed to using the RISC-V cores—for example, by eventually offering better specs and more features on RISC-V than Arm. In the meantime, software that supports the Raspberry Pi Pico will be ported to RISC-V with no disruption. If Arm acts up and RISC-V support is good enough or when it becomes clear users prefer RISC-V, Raspberry Pi can drop the Arm cores.

[1] https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/03/risc-y-business-arm-...

[2] https://gwern.net/complement

tredre32• 2 years ago

Each arm/riscv set likely share cache and register space (which takes most of the die space by far), resulting in being unable to use them both simultaneously.

formerly_proven• 2 years ago

Considering that these are off-the-shelf Cortex-M designs I doubt that Raspi was able or would be allowed to do that. I'd expect most of the die to be the 512K SRAM, some of the analog and power stuff and a lot of it just bond pads.

mmmlinux• 2 years ago

And still no USB C on the official devboard.

jsheard4• 2 years ago

There's plenty of alternatives right out of the gate, at least:

https://www.raspberrypi.com/for-industry/powered-by/product-...

Pimoroni has a maxed-out pin-compatible version with 16MB flash, 8MB PSRAM, and USB-C:

https://shop.pimoroni.com/products/pimoroni-pico-plus-2

moffkalast4• 2 years ago

Unless the USB-C connector costs $7-10, these are beyond ridiculously overpriced compared to the official dev board. At least throw in an IMU or something if you plan to sell low volumes at high prices jeez.

naikrovek3• 2 years ago

And still no USB C on the official devboard.

Do you live in a universe where micro-USB cables are not available, or something? There's gonna be something or other that needs micro-USB for the next decade, so just buy a few and move on. They're not expensive.

[later edit: I bet it has to do with backwards compatibility. They don't want people to need to rework case designs to use something that is meant as a drop-in replacement for the Pi Pico 1.]

ewoodrich3• 2 years ago

Personally I have about three dozen USB-A to USB-C cables lying around and the thought of actually spending money to acquire extra Micro USB cables in 2024 is very unappealing.

I (deliberately) haven’t bought a consumer electronic device that still uses Micro USB in years so don’t accumulate those cables for free anymore like with USB-C.

Of course ubiquitous USB-C dev boards/breakout boards without 5.1kΩ resistors for C-C power is its own frustration ... But I can tolerate that having so many extra USB-A chargers and cables. Trigger boards are great because they necessarily support PD without playing the AliExpress C-C lottery.

wolrah• 2 years ago

Do you live in a universe where micro-USB cables are not available, or something? There's gonna be something or other that needs micro-USB for the next decade, so just buy a few and move on. They're not expensive.

I live in a universe where type C has been the standard interface for devices for years, offering significant advantages with no downsides other than a slightly higher cost connector, and it's reasonable to be frustrated at vendors releasing new devices using the old connector.

It's certainly not as bad as some vendors of networking equipment who still to this day release new designs with Mini-B connectors that are actually officially deprecated, but it's not good nor worthy of defending in any way.

I bet it has to do with backwards compatibility. They don't want people to need to rework case designs to use something that is meant as a drop-in replacement for the Pi Pico 1.

Your logic is likely accurate here, but that just moves the stupid choice back a generation. It was equally dumb and annoying to have Micro-B instead of C on a newly designed and released device in 2021 as it is in 2024.

The type C connector was standardized in 2014 and became standard on phones and widely utilized on laptops starting in 2016.

IMO the only good reason to have a mini-B or micro-B connector on a device is for physical compatibility with a legacy design that existed prior to 2016. Compatibility with a previous bad decision is not a good reason, fix your mistakes.

Type A on hosts will still be a thing for a long time, and full-size type B still makes sense for large devices that are not often plugged/unplugged where the size is actually a benefit, but the mini-B connector is deprecated and the micro-B connector should be.

kvemkon4• 2 years ago

1 × USB 1.1 controller and PHY, with host and device support

Sure, after integrating USB 2.0 HS or 1Gb-Ethernet the pico2-board will cost more than $5. So, integrated high-speed interfacing with PC was not a nice-to-have option (for special chip flavor)?

solidninja• 2 years ago

I think the target here is low-power peripherals rather than speedy peripherals, and the price is very nice for that :)

kvemkon4• 2 years ago

Here [1] someone asked to make RP1 I/O chip available, but actually RP2350 is what would fit the purpose.

[1] https://www.raspberrypi.com/news/rp1-the-silicon-controlling...

rasz• 2 years ago

USB 2.0 HS

480 Mbps SERDES

or 1Gb-Ethernet

1.25 Gbps SERDES

kvemkon4• 2 years ago

RP1 I/O chip on RPi5 has so many high-speed interfaces. I've been thinking RP2350 could be some smart I/O chip for a PC/notebook/network attached computers (with only 1 necessary high-speed connection).

namibj• 2 years ago

GigE is actually PAM-4 at ~250 MBaud.

tecleandor3• 2 years ago

Not off topic but a bit tangentially...

How difficult would be emulating an old SRAM chip with an RP2040 or an RP2350? It's an early 80s (or older) 2048 word, 200ns access time CMOS SRAM that is used to save presets on an old Casio synth. It's not a continuous memory read, it just reads when loading the preset to memory.

I feel like PIO would be perfect for that.

dmitrygr9• 2 years ago

I did that, not just SRAM but also ROM, to fool a MC68EZ328 successfully. It works well. PIO + DMA does it well. Specifically i replaced rom & ram in an old Palm Pilot with an RP2040:

https://photos.app.goo.gl/KabVe5CrfckqnFEt7

https://photos.app.goo.gl/LGAkp6HoYAJc3Uft7

Edit: I did not yet update the rePalm article but much about that is in the Palm discord. https://discord.gg/qs8wQ4Bf

see #repalm-project channel

tecleandor3• 2 years ago

Ooooh, that looks cool and the PCB seems simple (at least from this side). Congrats!

Do you have anything published?

alfanick• 2 years ago

Pokemon are nice touch here

HeyLaughingBoy8• 2 years ago

If it's not an academic question and you have an actual need for the SRAM, what's the p/n? I have some old parts stock and may have what you need.

tecleandor3• 2 years ago

Oh! Thanks!

I wanted to do a clone or two of said cartridges, that use, IIRC (I'm not in my workshop right now) a couple Hitachi HM6116FP each.

I've also seen some clones from back in the day using a CXK5864PN-15L, that's 8 kilowords, and getting 4 switchable "memory banks" out of it...

bogantech• 2 years ago

For that you could just some FRAM with minimal effort

https://www.mouser.com/ProductDetail/877-FM16W08-SG

swetland2• 2 years ago

Lots of nice improvements here. The RISC-V RV32I option is nice -- so many RV32 MCUs have absurdly tiny amounts of SRAM and very limited peripherals. The Cortex M33s are a biiig upgrade from the M0+s in the RP2040. Real atomic operations. An FPU. I'm exited.

guenthert• 2 years ago

Many people seem excited about the FPU. Could you help me understand what hardware floating point support is needed in a MCU for? I remember DSPs using (awkward word-size) fixed point arithmetic.

jercos2• 2 years ago

I think you highlight the exact issue rather well... fixed-point DSP instructions are awkward to use. The FPU and the double-precision hardware with its baked operations work with IEEE floats out of the box, so the programmer can be "lazy." A thousand new programmers can write something like `* 0.7` in C++ inside a tight loop without it stealing 200 instructions from the timing of the rest of the program.

fouronnes3• 2 years ago

Curious about the low-power and sleep mode improvements!

geerlingguy5• 2 years ago

Me too; I had a little trouble with MicroPython lightsleep and deepsleep in the pre-release version I was testing.

I will re-test and try to get better sleep state in my code either today or tomorrow!

bschwindHN4• 2 years ago

Alright, what's the max image resolution/framerate someone is going to pump out with the HSTX peripheral?

spacedcowboy6• 2 years ago

Unfortunately the starter example [1] hasn't made it into the public tree (yet ?)

[1] https://github.com/raspberrypi/pico-examples/blob/master/dvi...

bschwindHN4• 2 years ago

I wonder what other uses people will find for it. It's one-way data transfer, I wonder if it could be hooked up to a USB 2.0 or USB 3.0 peripheral, or an ethernet PHY, or something else.

SethTro• 2 years ago

This has 2 of the 3 features (float support, faster clock) + more POI that was keeping me on ESP32. For projects that need wifi, and can tolerate the random interrupts, I'll stick with ESP32.

jononor2• 2 years ago

Aha, the 3 is for M33, not Cortex M3 (as some speculated based on the name). That makes a lot more sense! Integrated FPU is a big improvement over the RP2040, and M33 is a modern but proven core.

gchadwick• 2 years ago

This looks awesome a really great step up from the RP2040. I'm a big fan of the original and I'm excited to see all the improvements and upgrades.

I imagine with the new secure boot functionality they've got a huge new range of customers to tempt to.

Also exciting to see them dip their toe into the open silicon waters with the hazard 3 RISCV core https://github.com/Wren6991/Hazard3.

Of course it they'd used Ibex https://github.com/lowrisc/ibex the RISC-V core we develop and maintain at lowRISC that would have been even better but you can't have everything ;)

rowanG0772• 2 years ago

Would the pio now support sane Ethernet using rmii for example?

rscott20495• 2 years ago

I'm assuming you've looked at the pico-rmii-ethernet library? If so, I feel your pain - I've been fixing issues, and am about halfway done. (This is for the DECstation2040 project, available on github). Look for a release in late aug/early sep. (Maybe with actual lance code? Dmitry??) The RP2350 will make RMII slightly easier - the endless DMA allows elimination of the DMA reload channel(s).

rowanG0772• 2 years ago

I looked at it and dismissed it as too hacky for production. I don't remember the real reason why. I would have to look through my notes. The main question is whether the RP2350 will change that. As in it actually possible to do bug free without weird hacks.

nimish2• 2 years ago

Gross, the dev board uses micro-USB. It's 2024! Otherwise amazing work. Exactly what's needed to compete with the existing giants.

sowbug2• 2 years ago

Perhaps the unfortunate choice of micro USB is to discourage real consumer products from being built with the dev board.

user_7832• 2 years ago

I wonder if it is more about simply shaving a few cents off. Full USB-C protocol implementation may be much more difficult.

Findecanor3• 2 years ago

For the microcontroller however, the use in commercial products is encouraged.

There are one-time programmable registers for Vendor, Product, Device and Language IDs that the bootloader would use instead of the default. It would be interesting to see if those are fused on the Pico 2.

Teknoman1172• 2 years ago

I would assume it's in order to maintain mechanical compatibility with the previous Pico.

janice1999• 2 years ago

It saves cost and none of the features of USB-C (speed, power delivery etc) are supported. Makes sense.

str3wer• 2 years ago

the price difference from usb to usb-c is less than 2 cents

throwaway815232• 2 years ago

How about connections not becoming flaky after you've plugged in the cable a few times. Micro USB was horribly unreliable. USB-C isn't great either, but it's an improvement. Maybe they will get it right some day.

hoherd• 2 years ago

FWIW the Pimoroni Tiny 2040 and Tiny 2350 use usb-c, but as mentioned by other commenters, the cost for these usb-c boards is higher.

I love having usb-c on all my modern products, but with so many micro-usb cords sitting around, I don't mind that the official Pico and Pico 2 are micro-usb. At least there are options for whichever port you prefer for the project you're using it in.

magicalhippo• 2 years ago

The Pico 2 Plus[1] has USB-C, and seems quite reasonably priced to me given you get 16MB of Flash and 8MB PSRAM.

[1] https://shop.pimoroni.com/products/pimoroni-pico-plus-2

nine_k3• 2 years ago

USB-C is way more complicated, even if you're not trying to push 4K video or 100W power through it. The interface chip ought to be more complex, and thus likely more expensive.

You can still find a number of cheap gadgets with micro-USB on Aliexpress. Likely there's some demand, so yes, you can build a consumer product directly on the dev board, depending on your customer base.

nimish2• 2 years ago

Chinese boards are both cheaper and have usb type c implemented correctly and in spec, so that's no real excuse for raspberry pi

151553• 2 years ago

How are they "way more complicated?" You have to add two resistors and short another pair of DP/DM lines?

Ductapemaster• 2 years ago

You can use a USB C connector with standard USB, no interface chip required. It's simply a connector form-factor change.

ChrisArchitect• 2 years ago

Raspberry Pi Pico 2, our new $5 microcontroller board, on sale now

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41192341

weinzierl• 2 years ago

This is fantastic news. Is there information on power consumption? This is something that precludes a good deal of use cases for the RP2040 unfortunately and any improvements here would be good, but maybe the RP's are just not made for ultra low power?

ebenupton11• 2 years ago

Significant improvements to flat-out power (switcher vs LDO) and to idle power (low quiescent current LDO for retention). Still not a coin-cell device, but heading in the right direction.

TaylorAlexander6• 2 years ago

This is very exciting! For the last several years I have been developing a brushless motor driver based on the RP2040 [1]. The driver module can handle up to 53 volts at 30A continuous, 50A peak. I broke the driver out to a separate module recently which is helpful for our farm robot and is also important for driver testing as we improve the design. However this rev seems pretty solid, so I might build a single board low cost integrated single motor driver with the RP2350 soon! With the RP2040 the loop rate was 8khz which is totally fine for big farm robot drive motors, but some high performance drivers with floating point do 50khz loop rate.

My board runs SimpleFOC, and people on the forum have been talking about building a flagship design, but they need support for sensorless control as well as floating point, so if I use the new larger pinout variant of the RP2350 with 8 ADC pins, we can measure three current signals and three bridge voltages to make a nice sensorless driver! It will be a few months before I can have a design ready, but follow the git repo or my twitter profile [2] if you would like to stay up to date!

[1] https://github.com/tlalexander/rp2040-motor-controller

[2] https://twitter.com/TLAlexander

sgu999• 2 years ago

for our farm robot

That peaked my interest, here's the video for those who want to save a few clicks: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fFhTPHlPAAk

I absolutely love that they use bike parts for the feet and wheels.

HeyLaughingBoy8• 2 years ago

I have given some thought to a two-wheeled electric tractor for dealing with mud -- horse paddocks turn into basically a 1-foot deep slurry after heavy rain and it can be easier to deal with something small that sinks through the mud, down to solid ground than something using large floatation tires. Additional problem with large tires is that they tend to throw mud around, making everyone nearby even more dirty.

I haven't actually built anything (been paying attention to Taylor's work, though), but I came to the same conclusion that bike wheels & tires would probably be a good choice. It also doesn't hurt that we have many discarded kids' bikes all over the place.

tuatoru• 2 years ago

* piqued

qdot76367• 2 years ago

Ah, it's good to see you continuing your work with types of robots that start with f.

TaylorAlexander6• 2 years ago

Hah thats right. I did get some parts to try to update the other one you are referring to, but given all my projects it has not made it near the top of the queue yet.

roshankhan28• 2 years ago

i am not a engineer type of person but to even thing that someone is trying to create a motor is really impressive. When i was a kid , i used t break my toy cars and would get motors from it and felt like i really did something. good ol' days.

throwaway815232• 2 years ago

The motor controller is impressive, but it sounds like a motor controller (as it says), rather than a motor. That is, it's not mechanical, it's electrical, it sends inputs to the motor telling it when to turn the individual magnets on and off. That is a nontrivial challenge since it has to monitor the motor speeds under varying loads and send pulses at exactly the right time, but it's software and electronics, not machinery.

Rinzler89• 2 years ago

I have been developing a brushless motor driver based on the RP2040

Can I ask why? There's dedicated MCU for BLDC motor control out there that have the dedicated peripherals to get the best and easiest sensored/sensorless BLDC motor control plus the supporting application notes and code samples. The RP2040 is not equipped to be good at this task.

SequoiaHope2• 2 years ago

dedicated MCU for BLDC motor control

During the chip shortage, specialized chips like this were very hard to find. Meanwhile the RP2040 was the highest stocked MCU at digikey and most other places that carried it. The farm robot drive motors don't need high speed control loops or anything. We just needed a low cost flexible system we could have fabbed at JLCPCB. The RP2040 also has very nice documentation and in general is just very lovely to work with.

Also SimpleFOC was already ported to the RP2040, so we had example code etc too. Honestly the CPU was the easy part. As we expected, getting a solid mosfet bridge design was the challenging part.

technofiend• 2 years ago

Taylor, wow! I think you're the only person I've actually seen implement WAAS to boost GPS precision. So cool!

brcmthrowaway• 2 years ago

Why would I pick this over esp32 if I need to get shit done

ryukoposting8• 2 years ago

I can't imagine someone using an RP2040 in a real product, but the RP2350 fixes enough of my complaints that I'd be really excited to give it a shot.

There's a lot going for the 2040, don't get me wrong. TBMAN is a really cool concept. It overclocks like crazy. PIO is truly innovative, and it's super valuable for boatloads of companies looking to replace their 8051s/whatever with a daughterboard-adapted ARM core.

But, for every cool thing about the RP2040, there was a bad thing. DSP-level clock speeds but no FPU, and no hardware integer division. A USB DFU function embedded in boot ROM is flatly undesirable in an MCU with no memory protection. PIO support is extremely limited in third-party SDKs like Zephyr, which puts a low ceiling on its usefulness in large-scale projects.

The RP2350 fixes nearly all of my complaints, and that's really exciting.

PIO is a really cool concept, but relying on it to implement garden-variety peripherals like CAN or SDMMC immediately puts RP2350 at a disadvantage. The flexibility is very cool, but if I need to get a product up and running, the last thing I want to do is fiddle around with a special-purpose assembly language. My hope is that they'll eventually provide a library of ready-made "soft peripherals" for common things like SD/MMC, MII, Bluetooth HCI, etc. That would make integration into Zephyr (and friends) easier, and it would massively expand the potential use cases for the chip.

petra• 2 years ago

For high volume products, given the low cost of this chip, it would make sense to bother with the PIO or it's open-source libraries.

TaylorAlexander6• 2 years ago

My hope is that they'll eventually provide a library of ready-made "soft peripherals"

Perhaps they could be more ready-made, but there are loads of official PIO examples that are easy to get started with.

https://github.com/raspberrypi/pico-examples/tree/master/pio

ryukoposting8• 2 years ago

These examples are cute, but this isn't a comprehensive collection. Not even close.

Given that PIO's most compelling use case is replacing legacy MCUs, I find it disappointing that they haven't provided PIO boilerplate for the peripherals that keep those archaic architectures relevant. Namely: Ethernet MII and CANbus.

Also, if RP2xxx is ever going to play ball in the wireless space, then they need an out-of-box Bluetooth HCI implementation, and it needs sample code, and integration into Zephyr.

I speak as someone living in this industry: the only reason Nordic has such a firm grip on BLE product dev is because they're the only company providing a bullshit-free Bluetooth stack out of the box. Everything else about nRF sucks. If I could strap a CYW4343 to an RP2350 with some example code as easily as I can get a BT stack up and running on an nRF52840, I'd dump Nordic overnight.

crote4• 2 years ago

I feel like the PIO is just slightly too limited for that. You can already do some absolute magic with it, but it's quite easy to run into scenarios where it becomes really awkward to use due to the limited instruction count, lack of memory, and absence of a direct clock input.

Sure, you can work around it, but that often means making significant sacrifices. Good enough for some hacking, not quite there yet to fully replace hard peripherals.

my1234• 2 years ago

no hardware integer division

It did have it, but as an out-of-ISA extension

GeorgeTirebiter4• 2 years ago

Not only that, the single FP and double FP were provided as optimized subroutines. I was never hampered by inadequate FP performance for simple control tasks.

wrs• 2 years ago

I haven’t dug into the RP2xxx but I presumed there would be a library of PIO implementations of the standard protocols from RP themselves. There really isn’t?

Edit: I see, there are “examples”. I’d rather have those be first-class supported things.

robomartin3• 2 years ago

For my work, the lack of flash memory integration on the 2040 is a deal breaker. You cannot secure your code. Not sure that has changed with the new device.

ebenupton11• 2 years ago

It has: you can encrypt your code, store a decryption key in OTP, and decrypt into RAM. Or if your code is small and unchanging enough, store it directly in OTP.

__s• 2 years ago

RP2040 shows up in a lot of qmk keyboards, for real product use

Eduard• 2 years ago

RP2040 shows up in a lot of qmk keyboards

as niche as it gets

alex-robbins• 2 years ago

A USB DFU function embedded in boot ROM is flatly undesirable in an MCU with no memory protection.

Are you saying DFU is not useful without an MMU/MPU? Why would that be?

ryukoposting8• 2 years ago

It's certainly useful, but having it embedded within the hardware with no way to properly secure it makes the RP2040 a non-starter for any product I've ever written firmware for.

anymouse123456• 2 years ago

We're using 2040's in a variety of "real" products for an industrial application.

PIO is a huge selling point for me and I'm thrilled to see them leaning into it with this new version.

It's already as you hoped. Folks are developing PIO drivers for various peripherals (i.e., CAN and WS2812, etc.)

ryukoposting8• 2 years ago

Oh, I'm sure it's great for industrial, as long as you can live with the hardware security issues. In college, my first serious task as an intern was to take a Cortex-M0+ and make it pretend to be an 8051 MCU that was being obsoleted. Unsurprisingly, this was for an industrial automation firm.

I mimicked the 16-bit data bus using hand-written assembly to make sure the timings were as close as possible to the real chip. It was a pain in the ass. It would have been amazing to have a chip that was designed specifically to mimic peripherals like that.

It's great that there's a community growing around the RPi microcontrollers! That's a really good sign for the long-term health of the ecosystem they're trying to build.

What I'm looking for is a comprehensive library of PIO drivers that are maintained by RPi themselves. There would be a lot of benefits to that as a firmware developer: I would know the drivers have gone through some kind of QA. If I'm having issues, I could shoot a message to my vendor/RPi and they'll be able to provide support. If I find a bug, I could file that bug and know that someone is going to receive it and fix it.

nrp• 2 years ago

We ship a large quantity of RP2040’s in real products, and agreed that the RP2350 looks great too!

Part of the reason we went with RP2040 was the design philosophy, but a lot of it was just easy availability coming out of the chip crunch.

tliltocatl• 2 years ago

>> extremely limited in third-party SDKs like Zephyr

So is almost any non-trivial peripheral feature. Autonomous peripheral operation, op-amps, comparators, capture/compare timers…

Zephyr tries to provide a common interface like desktop OSes do and this doesn't really work. On desktop having just the least common denominator is often enough. On embedded you choose your platform because you want the uncommon features.

crest2• 2 years ago

no hardware integer division

The RP2040 SIO block contains one hardware divider per CPU core.

valdiorn• 2 years ago

I can't imagine someone using an RP2040 in a real product

Why not? It's a great chip, even if it has some limitations. I use it in several of my pro audio products (a midi controller, a Eurorack module, and a series of guitar pedals). they are absolutely perfect as utility chips, the USB stack is good, the USB bootloader makes it incredibly easy for customers to update the firmware without me having to write a custom bootloader.

I've shipped at least a thousand "real" products with an RP2040 in them.

ryukoposting8• 2 years ago

Given the way the RP2040 is set up, I cannot conceive of a proper secure boot chain for it. So, for basically everything I work on professionally, it's a non-starter. I think the key in your use case is that "hackability" is a feature, not a potentially life-threatening risk.

jackwilsdon• 2 years ago

I'm most excited for the partition and address translation support - partitions can be mapped to the same address for A/B boot slots (and it supports "try before you buy" to boot into a slot temporarily). No more compiling two copies for the A and B slots (at different addresses)!

vardump12• 2 years ago

RP2040 had Doom ported to it. https://kilograham.github.io/rp2040-doom/

RP2350 looks very much like it could potentially run Quake. Heck, some of the changes almost feel like they're designed for this purpose.

FPU, two cores at 150 MHz, overclockable beyond 300 MHz and it supports up to 16 MB of PSRAM with hardware R/W paging support.

chipxsd• 2 years ago

While outputting DVI! I wouldn't be surprised.

rvense5• 2 years ago

Mouser have 64 megabyte PSRAMs.

I really want a Mac System 7 grade operating system for this chip...

refulgentis2• 2 years ago

If we can get flutter running on these...

v1ne• 2 years ago

Hmm, it's really nice that they fixed so many complaints. But honestly, reading the errata sheet, I had to chuckle that Dmitry didn't tear this chip to pieces.

I mean, there's erratums about obscure edge cases, about miniscule bugs. Sure, mistakes happen. And then there's this: Internal pull-downs don't work reliably.

Workaround: Disconnect digital input and only connect while you're reading the value. Well, great! Now it takes 3 instructions to read data from a port, significantly reducing the rate at which you can read data!

I guess it's just rare to have pull-downs, so that's naturally mitigating the issue a bit.

colejohnson662• 2 years ago

You can also use external resistors.

urbandw311er• 2 years ago

I absolutely love this guy’s enthusiasm.

kaycebasques5• 2 years ago

Big day for my team (Pigweed)! Some of our work got mentioned in the main RP2350/Pico2 announcement [1] but for many months we've been working on a new end-to-end SDK [2] built on top of Bazel [3] with support for both RP2040 and RP2350, including upstreaming Bazel support to the Pico SDK. Our new "Tour of Pigweed" [4] shows a bunch of Pigweed features working together in a single codebase, e.g. hermetic builds, on-device unit tests, RPC-centric comms, factory-at-your-desk testing, etc. We're over in our Discord [5] if you've got any questions

[1] https://www.raspberrypi.com/news/raspberry-pi-pico-2-our-new...

[2] https://opensource.googleblog.com/2024/08/introducing-pigwee...

[3] https://blog.bazel.build/2024/08/08/bazel-for-embedded.html

[4] https://pigweed.dev/docs/showcases/sense/

[5] https://discord.gg/M9NSeTA

dheera• 2 years ago

I hate Bazel. A build system for C/C++ should not require a Java JVM. Please keep Java out of microcontroller ecosystem please -__--

jaeckel2• 2 years ago

And only discord on top, but maybe I'm simply not hip enough

kaycebasques5• 2 years ago

We realize Bazel is not the right build system for every embedded project. The "Bazel for Embedded" post that came out today (we co-authored it) talks more about why we find Bazel so compelling: https://blog.bazel.build/2024/08/08/bazel-for-embedded.html

clumsysmurf• 2 years ago

Maybe there is a way to create a native executable with GraalVM...

TickleSteve3• 2 years ago

I have to admit, Bazel as a build system would mean it wouldnt even be considered by me, it has to fit in with everything else which typically means Makefiles, like it or not.

TBH, Java + Bazel + Discord makes it seem like its out of step with the embedded world.

steeve• 2 years ago

Bazel is amazing and doing C++ with anything other is like going back to the stone age.

The Bazel team has done an amazing job, the VM is embedded and trimmed. It’s as easy and download and run.

And worst case you can invest in Buck2.

snvzz5• 2 years ago

Is RISC-V supported?

I am surprised the Pigweed announcement makes no mention of this.

simfoo• 2 years ago

Pretty awesome. I love Bazel and it seems you're making good use of it. It's such a difference seeing everything hermetically integrated with all workflows boiling down to a Bazel command.

boznz2• 2 years ago

I got almost all of my wishes granted with RP2350

I got all mine, these guys really listened to the (minor) criticisms of the RP2040 on their forums and knocked them out of the ball park. Cant wait to get my hands on real hardware. Well done guys

ebenupton11• 2 years ago

Thank you. It's been a major effort from the team, and I'm very proud of what they've accomplished.

vardump12• 2 years ago

Thanks for a great product!

A (small?) ask. Can we have instruction timings please? Like how many cycles SMLAL (signed multiply long, with accumulate) takes?

Will there be an official development board with all 48 GPIOs exposed?

begriffs• 2 years ago

I see CMSIS definitions for the RP2040 at https://github.com/raspberrypi/CMSIS-RP2xxx-DFP but none for RP2350. Maybe they'll eventually appear in that repo, given its name is RP2xxx? I thought vendors are legally obligated to provide CMSIS definitions when they license an ARM core.

tibbon• 2 years ago

Thanks for making the DEF CON badge! 10000x cooler than last year

GeorgeTirebiter4• 2 years ago

What is the process node used? Who is fabbing this for them? Given that the new chip is bigger, my guess is the same (old) process node is being used. RP2040 is manufactured on a 40nm process node.

Whoops, I read the fine print: RP2350 is manufactured on a 40nm process node.

ckemere• 2 years ago

I wish there was a way to share memory with a Pi. The PIO looks great for high speed custom IO, but 100Mb scale interface to/from it is quite hard/unsolved.

boznz2• 2 years ago

This is amazing IP; it makes you wonder if the RPi foundation could be a target for Aquisition by one of the big microcontroller manufacturers.

spacedcowboy6• 2 years ago

$deity I hope not. Then we lose the price/performance of these little beauties.

294j59243j• 2 years ago

But still USB-micro instead of USB-C. Raspberry Picos are literally the one and only reason why I still own any older USB cables.

Taniwha• 2 years ago

New BusPirate 5XL&6 also dropping today - use the 3250

https://buspirate.com/

endorphine• 2 years ago

Can someone explain what projects this can be used for?

vardump12• 2 years ago

It's a pretty generic µC, especially well suited for projects that require high-speed (GP)I/O. It can replace an FPGA in some cases.

DSP extensions and FPU support are also decent, so good for robotics, (limited) AI, audio, etc.

Also great for learning embedded systems. Very low barrier of entry, just need to download IDE and connect it with an USB cable.

anyfoo• 2 years ago

> I was not paid or compensated for this article in any way
However the Raspberry Pi engineer in question WAS compensated for the samples, in the form of a flight over downtown Austin in Dmitry's Cirrus SR22.

Hahah, I’ve been in that plane. Only in my case, it was a flight to a steak house in central California, and I didn’t actually do anything to get “compensated”, I was just at the right place at the right time.

Anyway, I am extremely excited about this update, RPi are knocking it out of the park. That there is a variant with flash now is a godsend by itself, but the updates to the PIO and DMA engines make me dream up all sorts of projects.

hashtag-til• 2 years ago

The disclaimer is brutally honest. I love it.

1oooqooq• 2 years ago

It overclocks insanely well

says the guy with engineering samples and creme of the creme silicon parts... i expect most that will actually be available when they do to their normal schedule of scraping the literal bottom of the barrel to keep their always empty stocks that will not be the case.

TheCipster• 2 years ago

While I completely agree with the content of the post, I still think that QFN packages in general, and RP2350's in particular, are very hobbyist-averse.

Moving all GND pins to the bottom pad makes this chip usable only by people with a reflow oven. I really hoped to see at least a version released as (T)QFP.

dgacmu2• 2 years ago

Isn't the hobbyist solution to just build a board to which you can attach an entire pico board? That does preclude some things and adds $3, but it makes for a pretty easy prototyping path.

jsfnaoad• 2 years ago

Hard disagree. A TQFP package this dense is still quite challenging for a hobbyist. Just use a breakout board, dev board or get the QFN assembled for you at jlcpcb

mastax2• 2 years ago

My reflow oven is a $5 hot plate and a $15 toaster oven. I don’t know if that is very hobbyist averse.

amelius3• 2 years ago

So, in conclusion, go replan all your STM32H7 projects with RP2350, save money, headaches, and time.

Except the STM32H7 series goes up until 600MHz.

Overclocking is cool, but you can't do that on most commercial projects.

amelius3• 2 years ago

How easy is it to share memory between two of these processors?

sounds• 2 years ago

Hmm, a 4-core cluster?

Easiest would be to wire up two chips with bidirectional links and use a fault handler to transfer small blocks of memory across. You're reimplementing a poor man's MESIF https://stackoverflow.com/questions/31876808.

amelius3• 2 years ago

This is something I'd like to see an article about on HN :)

andylinpersonal3• 2 years ago

In terms of security features, it lacks on-the-fly external memory (flash and PSRAM) encryption and decryption as ESP32 and some newer STM32s did. Decrypting by custom OTP bootloader and running entirely in the internal SRAM maybe sometimes limited for larger firmware.

ralferoo• 2 years ago

I presume the article was edited to change its headline after it was submitted to HN, but it's interesting that it doesn't match up with the HN title. It's still a subjective but positive title, but somehow feels like it has a different tone to the title on HN:

HN: "I got almost all of my wishes granted with RP2350"

Article: "Why you should fall in love with the RP2350"

title tag: "Introducing the RP2350"

mastax2• 2 years ago

It's a bit surprising that they put so much effort into security for the second microcontroller from a young consumer-oriented* company. My first instinct was to distrust it's security, simply due to lack of experience. However, the "experienced" vendors' secure micros have lots of known security bugs and, more crucially, a demonstrated desire to sweep them under the rug. Two security architecture audits, a $10k bug bounty, and designing a board for glitching as the DEF CON badge shows a pretty big commitment to security. I'm curious about how the Redundancy Coprocessor works. I still wouldn't be surprised if someone breaks it, at least partially.

* By perception at least. They have been prioritizing industrial users from a revenue and supply standpoint, it seems.

I got almost all of my wishes granted with RP2350

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