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.

> My hope is that they'll eventually provide a library of ready-made "soft peripherals"

Perhaps they could be more ready-made, but there are loads of official PIO examples that are easy to get started with.

https://github.com/raspberrypi/pico-examples/tree/master/pio

These examples are cute, but this isn't a comprehensive collection. Not even close.

Given that PIO's most compelling use case is replacing legacy MCUs, I find it disappointing that they haven't provided PIO boilerplate for the peripherals that keep those archaic architectures relevant. Namely: Ethernet MII and CANbus.

Also, if RP2xxx is ever going to play ball in the wireless space, then they need an out-of-box Bluetooth HCI implementation, and it needs sample code, and integration into Zephyr.

I speak as someone living in this industry: the only reason Nordic has such a firm grip on BLE product dev is because they're the only company providing a bullshit-free Bluetooth stack out of the box. Everything else about nRF sucks. If I could strap a CYW4343 to an RP2350 with some example code as easily as I can get a BT stack up and running on an nRF52840, I'd dump Nordic overnight.