Raspberry Pi Makes A RISC-V Bet

The new Pico 2 has just dropped with some impressive specs, including Raspberry Pi's own RP2350, a unique offering for hobbyists and professionals alike that presents options for both ARM and RISC-V (on boot anyway).

RISC-V?

Without taking too deep a dive into chip architecture, your favourite offerings from Intel, AMD and Apple are all based on one of two architectures, X86 and ARM. These two architectures represent a fundamental difference of opinion on computing.

Do we make things easier for the human or the computer?

If this is interesting, I wrote another article about X86, ARM and RISC-V, but the long and the short of it is that RISC-V is an open source architecture utilising the RISC instruction set, which makes it a very interesting prospect in the future of computing, and Raspberry Pi including the option in their latest offering bodes well for the future of the architecture.

Back To The Pico

The Pico 2 is quite a leap forward from its predecessor. Along with the new RP2350, we get double the RAM at 512Kb, double the flash at 4Mb and several quality-of-life benefits such as onboard OTP storage and hardware TRNG (a random number generator that relies on physical phenomena that are very difficult to predict). We also get a nice bump in PIO from 8-12 channels. For the IoT enthusiasts, a particularly interesting upgrade is the deep-sleep improvement to < 10µA, an order of magnitude improvement on the previous generation. Ready to roll with either C/C++ or MicroPython out of the box, they Pico remains a great starting point for beginners as well.

Raspberry Pi's investment into the Pico 2 implies a commitment to cementing their place in the embedded space and whilst their boards are still predominantly catering to hobbyists and beginners, these improvements make the Pico 2 a great choice for a number of professional applications. It will be interesting to see Pi's direction in the coming years post going public, but it's obvious to everyone that they intend to place themselves as the go-to board provider in embedded computing.