Raspberry Pi Pico Announced As $4 Microcontroller

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Raspberry Pi Pico Announced As $4 Microcontroller

Following November's launch of the Raspberry Pi 400 keyboard computer there is another new product from the UK foundation and it's not a new Raspberry Pi SBC...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Raspberry-Pi-Pico

[ddriver]

That would be a fairly good deal, two cores and plenty of memory at that price... sounds like it will be in short supply, with per customer limits and whatnot, same as the zero, just worse.

[WonkoTheSaneUK]

That would be a fairly good deal, two cores and plenty of memory at that price... sounds like it will be in short supply, with per customer limits and whatnot, same as the zero, just worse.

Supplier Pimoroni has a "3 per customer" limit for now. Also, all the usual suspects are working on new hardware using the SoC, which will be available separately.

[chocolate]

That would be a fairly good deal, two cores and plenty of memory at that price... sounds like it will be in short supply, with per customer limits and whatnot, same as the zero, just worse.

Plenty of memory??? IRAM is definitely the bottleneck here. Stupidly powerful dual-core CPU paired with so little IRAM, hardly makes any sense. No mention of off-chip SDRAM compatibility either. Support for off-chip storage is... decent.

[squash]

interesting stuff, they actually announced about 10 products built using their microcontroller. How long before there's an arduino port to them? Likely not long as they mention working with the arduino folks in their announcement. it'll be interesting to see where they fall as far as street prices, they are entering a pretty crowded market with atmel and esp providing pretty amazing products at fairly absurdly low prices.

[ddriver]

Stupidly powerful dual-core CPU paired with so little IRAM

Those are not stupidly powerful cores, and the ram is not little for that market, the classic arduino has only 2kb of ram, this thing has over 256k, or almost half of what anyone would ever need

If anything that's quite a lot of ram for what this is, IMO even 64k per core is more than enough for a good 99% of the use cases. Remember, this is a microcontorller. They probably put so much memory on it because of their desire to push python use with it, and python is a memory hog. OK-ish specs for python makes for a beast for c / c++.

[brent]

Cortex-M0+ is definitely not a "beast", not even at > 100 MHz clock. These cores have very low IPC, they are almost completely optimized for chip area/cost.

I remember some software crypto stuff I was doing was running 3-4x faster on a Cortex-M3 compared to Cortex-M0 clock by clock. Cortex-M0 is OK for some simple control stuff, but if you actually need to crunch numbers, no matter how little, they're really bad.

[JanW]

How long before there's an arduino port to them? Likely not long as they mention working with the arduino folks in their announcement.

You're spot on. Arduino folks are working on it.

From that blog post:

We are going to port the Arduino core to this new architecture in order to enable everyone to use the RP2040 chip with the Arduino ecosystem (IDE, command line tool, and thousands of libraries). Although the RP2040 chip is fresh from the plant, our team is already working on the porting effort… stay tuned.

[caligula]

Plenty of memory??? IRAM is definitely the bottleneck here. Stupidly powerful dual-core CPU paired with so little IRAM, hardly makes any sense. No mention of off-chip SDRAM compatibility either. Support for off-chip storage is... decent.

Keep in mind the original RPi also had some serious limitations, but that won't prevent people from buying every last piece of the manufactured stock. It's still better than Arduino Nano or ESP32.

[schmidtbag]

Very interesting. Better specs than an Arduino Uno while being physically smaller, cheaper, and capable of more than just C.
Not sure how much use the USB host could be, though.