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I got almost all of my wishes granted with RP2350

(dmitry.gr)
700 points elipsitz | 2 comments | 08 Aug 24 13:03 UTC | HN request time: 0.001s | source
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swetland ◴[08 Aug 24 16:05 UTC] No.41193012[source]▶
Lots of nice improvements here. The RISC-V RV32I option is nice -- so many RV32 MCUs have absurdly tiny amounts of SRAM and very limited peripherals. The Cortex M33s are a biiig upgrade from the M0+s in the RP2040. Real atomic operations. An FPU. I'm exited.
replies(1): >>41200445 #
1. guenthert ◴[09 Aug 24 10:19 UTC] No.41200445[source]▶
Many people seem excited about the FPU. Could you help me understand what hardware floating point support is needed in a MCU for? I remember DSPs using (awkward word-size) fixed point arithmetic.
replies(1): >>41219173 #
2. jercos ◴[11 Aug 24 20:39 UTC] No.41219173[source]▶
I think you highlight the exact issue rather well... fixed-point DSP instructions are awkward to use. The FPU and the double-precision hardware with its baked operations work with IEEE floats out of the box, so the programmer can be "lazy." A thousand new programmers can write something like `* 0.7` in C++ inside a tight loop without it stealing 200 instructions from the timing of the rest of the program.