So, my lovely postie has just dropped my new Raspberry Pi Pico 2’s through the letter box.

Why is this of any interest to you? Well, Raspberry Pi just had a successful IPO on the London stock market. This new product means that their product range now stretches from the Pi 5, which is a credible desktop machine at the top end, through the Pi Compute Module, which allows equipement manufacturers to easily embed a powerful Linux machine into their products, down to the Pico series and their associated chips, which cost around £1 and can put intelligence into all manner of consumer goods, IoT devices, and medical devices. Across the range, pretty much no other manufacturer can compare. Each new Pi product has include real innovation. And this augures pretty well for the future value of Raspberry Pi stock.

So I thought I’d run a quick performance test on the original Pico against the Pico 2. And just for amusement, I’d do it as a micropython benchmark.

As a reminder, the new Pico 2 has a faster stock clock speed of 150M, and an #arm Cortex M33 instead of the Cortex M0. It also has a hardware FPU.

So, what’s the score? On integer arithmetic, the Pico 2 is just about 2 twice as fast out of the box. On floating point it shaves about 20% off the Pico 1 numbers, which indicates, unsurprisingly that micropython is not using the hardware FPU.

Just for yucks, I overclocked the Pico 2 to 250MHz and it ran the benchmarks smoothly and without complaint with a proportional increase in performance of nearly 2x.

Of course, you don’t run micropython for speed, and if I wanted real performance tests I’d do this in C, but on the other hand just running python is a performance test in itself :-).

Remember this is a single threaded test on just one core, and we have two!

Caveat: I’ve forked a pretty old micropython benchmark for this test and not really examined in any detail for this smoke test, so feel free to throw rocks.

All in all this put the RP2350 which powers the Pico 2 at the very top end of current microcontrollers, plus it packs unique features that have proved very popular.

You can see the results here: https://github.com/mkarliner/micropython_benchmarks