Re: New Pico2

On Sun, 11 Aug 2024 22:32:38 +0100, Single Stage to Orbit
<alex.buell@munted.eu> wrote:

On Sun, 2024-08-11 at 21:45 +0100, Andy Burns wrote:

Surprised nobody has mentioned the Pico2 boards (based on RP2350A or
RP2350B chips, instead of RP2040).
 
2x ARM cores plus 2x RISC-V cores (perm any 2 from 4)
150 MHz with FPU instead of 133MHz without
lower power consumption
more I/O pins (B model only?)
 
I really ought to buy a couple for tinkering ...
 
official boards not available yet, but 3rd party boards are, e.g.
 
<https://shop.pimoroni.com/products/tiny-2350?variant=42092638699603>
<https://shop.pimoroni.com/products/pga2350?variant=42092629229651>

>
Pimoroni Pico plus 2 is sitting on my desktop ready for me to play with
it.
>
This beast also has 16MB of flashram and 8MB of PSRAM. I've also got a
SD card board and some headers I need to solder on to use with it.
>
I've got a RISCV baremetal operating system I might bring up on this
device but looking at the datasheet for the RISCV processor used, it's
only got machine mode and user mode, no supervisor mode and no paging.
It does not even support any of the Sv pagetables so that's a
challenge.

Our computer thinking evolved when CPUs filled rooms and cost
megabucks, and RAM cost a dollar per byte. Things have changed.

Virtual memory worked around the cost of RAM and encouraged complexity
and bloat. Similarly, c calling conventions gave us hazards.

It's time to rethink things. CPUs and RAM are cheap, bloated buggy
code is expensive.

>
Most interestingly enough, you can actually boot up with one RISCV core
and one ARM core, two RISCV cores or both ARM cores. Mixed processor
cores that'll be fun to see what we can do with that.

In real life, done is better than fun.