Announcing the Raspberry Pico2, just moments ago:-
https://www.raspberrypi.com/news/raspberry-pi-pico-2-our-new-5-microcontroller-board-on-sale-now/
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Wow! That's quite an upgrade.
More PIO state machines, more RAM and hardware floating point/DSP plus two 150MHz Arm Cortex-M33 cores for starters. $5.
I'll have to get couple of those.
I just ordered a couple myself.
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An interesting way to support floating point. For double they have an assist co-processor that speeds up parts of the operations with multiple instructions to do the operation. For single they use the standard ARM support. See sections 3.6.2 and 3.6.4. (The software handles the details so most users won't care.)
That is interesting. I know very little about how various processors do floating point. Apparently the coprocessor technique allowed them to save some die area.
Full floating point support requires a lot of transistors (die area), even more so for double. By using the assist processor for the core function they can significantly reduce the hardware while still getting a speed up since the rest of the code to implement the function needs fewer instructions than a full software implementation.
There were a lot of interesting approaches in the "old days" when hardware was much more expensive. For example some systems did division by calculating the reciprocal using the (fast) multiply hardware.
The "coprocessor" methodology does mean additional complications in the compiler and context-saving realms.
For instance, I don't think that the Arduino core has ever implemented using the accelerated floating point ROM functions in the rp2040: rp2040 core does not use rom floating point functions · Issue #614 · arduino/ArduinoCore-mbed · GitHub
Also interesting and strange:
There will be a lot of talk about relative performance of the two architectures.
Raspberry Pico2
Any news on what the deep sleep current is ?
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I saw this video about this last night. It says the data sheet suggests 10uA but this maker has not got it down below 4mA.
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