Re: New Pico2

On 8/12/2024 5:56 AM, Single Stage to Orbit wrote:

On Mon, 2024-08-12 at 12:04 +0100, Ahem A Rivet's Shot wrote:

The days of fitting an instruction set on a page or two are long
gone.

 The RISCV instruction set for the cores in the Pico is just 137. It's
all in a table on one page in the rp2350 datasheet.

SoC/MCU datasheets have been "tomes" for more than a decade.  It's
not the details of the instruction set that require the most
paper/pages but, rather, the details of all of the I/Os and
particulars of the programming model.
E.g., the datasheet for the A5 core that I'm using is almost 2000
pages (~1900).  And, that doesn't count the Architecture Reference
Manual (2700 pp), details of the FPU, MMU, secure boot, debug
interface (300 pp), etc.  Or, any of the tools available to
support hardware/software development!
They aren't "trivial components" that can be characterized in
a dozen pages of text, tables and graphs like MPUs of days gone by.
[At least we've moved past the days of needing hundreds of pages to
explain the *notion* of a microprocessor to the Reader!]