I got almost all of my wishes granted with RP2350

I can't imagine someone using an RP2040 in a real product, but the RP2350 fixes enough of my complaints that I'd be really excited to give it a shot.

There's a lot going for the 2040, don't get me wrong. TBMAN is a really cool concept. It overclocks like crazy. PIO is truly innovative, and it's super valuable for boatloads of companies looking to replace their 8051s/whatever with a daughterboard-adapted ARM core.

But, for every cool thing about the RP2040, there was a bad thing. DSP-level clock speeds but no FPU, and no hardware integer division. A USB DFU function embedded in boot ROM is flatly undesirable in an MCU with no memory protection. PIO support is extremely limited in third-party SDKs like Zephyr, which puts a low ceiling on its usefulness in large-scale projects.

The RP2350 fixes nearly all of my complaints, and that's really exciting.

PIO is a really cool concept, but relying on it to implement garden-variety peripherals like CAN or SDMMC immediately puts RP2350 at a disadvantage. The flexibility is very cool, but if I need to get a product up and running, the last thing I want to do is fiddle around with a special-purpose assembly language. My hope is that they'll eventually provide a library of ready-made "soft peripherals" for common things like SD/MMC, MII, Bluetooth HCI, etc. That would make integration into Zephyr (and friends) easier, and it would massively expand the potential use cases for the chip.

For my work, the lack of flash memory integration on the 2040 is a deal breaker. You cannot secure your code. Not sure that has changed with the new device.

It has: you can encrypt your code, store a decryption key in OTP, and decrypt into RAM. Or if your code is small and unchanging enough, store it directly in OTP.

You can certainly do that, sure, but any Cortex-M MCU can do that, and plenty of others have hardware AES acceleration that would make the process much less asinine.

Also, 520K of RAM wouldn't be enough to fit a the whole application + working memory for any ARM embedded firmware I've worked on in the last 5 years.

> Also, 520K of RAM wouldn't be enough to fit a the whole application + working memory for any ARM embedded firmware I've worked on in the last 5 years.

what are you smoking? I have an entire decstation3100 system emulator that fits into 4K of code and 384bytes of ram. I boot palmos in 400KB of RAM. if you cannot fit your "application" into half a meg, maybe time to take up javascript and let someone else do embedded?

There are plenty of embedded applications that require megabytes or even gigabytes.

For example medical imaging.

As well as plenty that require 16 bytes of RAM and a few hundred bytes of program memory. And everything in between.

If it's in the gigabyte range it's just not an MCU by any stretch. And if it has a proper (LP)DDR controller it's not one either really

Yes and no. Plenty of such applications that use a µC + an FPGA. FPGA interfaces with some DDR memory and CMOS/CCD/whatever.

Up to you what you call it.

So you make hardware costing dozens of thousands of dollars and brag about memory on 5$ chip? That explains a lot why so many medical and industrial (I haven’t touch military hardware) are so badly designed, with some sad proprietary protocols and dead few months after warranty passes. Today I’ve learned!