3 ms·

Is Pico their attempt at breaking away from Broadcom? I am still waiting some better IO connectors so I can connect an SSD to RPi.

geerlingguy 4y ago
I don't think so—the RP2040 has a couple very slow Cortex-M0 cores, and it's not anywhere near the capability of the BCM2711. I'd imagine if Raspberry Pi were to try their hand at their own SoC chip, it would be someday in the future when RISC-V designs have matured enough to make a suitable successor. Otherwise, making a chip as complex as a modern SoC requires a lot of resources a smaller company like Raspberry Pi just doesn't have at their disposal.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- crest 4y ago
  And if TSMC pushes them from 40nm to 28nm the M0+ cores and SRAM should scale to even higher clock rates without drawing too much power. While the RP2040 is "only" specified at up to 133MHz it has been reported stable at over twice that. From the scattered reports at least the AHB-lite bus matrix, SRAM and CPU cores are stable up to ~400MHz which more than compensates for the lower per clock throughput on anything but floating point heavy code. The RP2040 isn't perfect, but it's a good starting point for more capable/specialised chips e.g. variants with high speed USB, 100Mb/s MAC, just scaled up (four M0+ cores, 8way interleaved memory banks, additional PIO and DMA engines, dual QSPI). Just upgrading to a good dual QSPI peripheral would make the chip more versatile allowing users to choose between different external memory configuration like SPI flash and PSRAM or higher combined flash read bandwidth.
- klelatti 4y ago
  The barrier to a PI SoC is the non CPU components - which are proprietary to companies like Broadcom. I’m sure that RPi could happily license an Arm core - indeed they have with the Pico - and the existence or otherwise of RISC-V cores is beside the point.
- unwind 4y ago
  Uh some of us here in the "real" embedded world read the RP2040's specs (dual Cortex-M0+ cores clocked at 133 MHz, bare chip cost is $1) and go "uh there's a typo here, they put THREE digits in the clock speed hahaha". Not really, but you get my point. For the kinds of devices the RP2040 competes with, it is not slow.

geerlingguy 4y ago

I don't think so—the RP2040 has a couple very slow Cortex-M0 cores, and it's not anywhere near the capability of the BCM2711. I'd imagine if Raspberry Pi were to try their hand at their own SoC chip, it would be someday in the future when RISC-V designs have matured enough to make a suitable successor. Otherwise, making a chip as complex as a modern SoC requires a lot of resources a smaller company like Raspberry Pi just doesn't have at their disposal.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
crest 4y ago
And if TSMC pushes them from 40nm to 28nm the M0+ cores and SRAM should scale to even higher clock rates without drawing too much power. While the RP2040 is "only" specified at up to 133MHz it has been reported stable at over twice that. From the scattered reports at least the AHB-lite bus matrix, SRAM and CPU cores are stable up to ~400MHz which more than compensates for the lower per clock throughput on anything but floating point heavy code. The RP2040 isn't perfect, but it's a good starting point for more capable/specialised chips e.g. variants with high speed USB, 100Mb/s MAC, just scaled up (four M0+ cores, 8way interleaved memory banks, additional PIO and DMA engines, dual QSPI). Just upgrading to a good dual QSPI peripheral would make the chip more versatile allowing users to choose between different external memory configuration like SPI flash and PSRAM or higher combined flash read bandwidth.
klelatti 4y ago
The barrier to a PI SoC is the non CPU components - which are proprietary to companies like Broadcom. I’m sure that RPi could happily license an Arm core - indeed they have with the Pico - and the existence or otherwise of RISC-V cores is beside the point.
unwind 4y ago
Uh some of us here in the "real" embedded world read the RP2040's specs (dual Cortex-M0+ cores clocked at 133 MHz, bare chip cost is $1) and go "uh there's a typo here, they put THREE digits in the clock speed hahaha". Not really, but you get my point. For the kinds of devices the RP2040 competes with, it is not slow.