Yea! Raspberry Pi have just started taking orders for the Pico 2!

Just ordered two.

Just to remind you, the orginal Pico and the RP2040 processor it uses have become a staple of embedded systems design, partially because of it’s innovative PIO processors which can offload all kinds of IO processing from the main system.

The new one is faster, has more memory, and can have either ARM or RISC V cores.

Let’s just go over that last point. the new RP2350 SoC has a total of four cores, two of which can be active at any one time. Mostly, people will go for two cores of the same architectures. Why have they done this? Well, I think that it’s because RISC V cores are pretty cheap in terms of silicon area, so it’s a very low additional cost and it’s also a good way of trying out their new in-house RISC V core design without having to launch another product. Once again, the Pi Foundation have done something that’s quite unique and smart.

These aren’t just boards for teaching, they and their underlying processors are finding their way into all sorts of applications. I recently used the original RP2040 in a composite USB device design and it’s a real pleasure to work with. The combination of their PIO’s and DMA architecture mean that an awful lot of bit shovelling can be done at high speed without impacting the main processor at all. The new SoC, with a hardware FPU and apparently some DSP instructions should punch way above it’s weight in embedded applications, with a cost that is supposed to be only 10% higher than the original RP2040.