What’s inside the Raspberry Pi Pico 2’s RP2350?

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Specs to “die” for

Raspberry Pi Pico 2 RP2350
(Image credit: Tom's Hardware)

The new Raspberry Pi Pico 2, released just two weeks ago, has garnered a lot of attention from the maker community. Powered by the RP2350, the Pico 2 comes with two different CPUs in one package. The first is a powerful dual-core Arm Cortex M33, the second is RISC-V based and designed as a personal project by Raspberry Pi engineer Luke Wren.

(Image credit: Raspberry Pi)
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Les Pounder
Les Pounder
Associate Editor

Les Pounder is an associate editor at Tom's Hardware. He is a creative technologist and for seven years has created projects to educate and inspire minds both young and old. He has worked with the Raspberry Pi Foundation to write and deliver their teacher training program "Picademy".

6 Comments Comment from the forums
  • mwhannan74
    Could someone help me understand how this MCU compare to something like the Teensy 4.0? I have been using Teensy boards for almost a decade and the 4 series comes with a 600 MHz ARM Cortex-M7 that is vastly superior to the pico. The Teensy is clearly a lot more expensive at $20, but it has full integration with the Arduino IDE. What is the benefit, besides cost, of the Pico? Thanks
    Reply
  • bit_user
    mwhannan74 said:
    Could someone help me understand how this MCU compare to something like the Teensy 4.0? I have been using Teensy boards for almost a decade and the 4 series comes with a 600 MHz ARM Cortex-M7 that is vastly superior to the pico. The Teensy is clearly a lot more expensive at $20, but it has full integration with the Arduino IDE. What is the benefit, besides cost, of the Pico? Thanks
    Also, consider power consumption. For certain IoT applications, that might be a big deal.

    For many embedded control applications, you don't need a lot of CPU performance. If 600 MHz is fast enough, there's a good chance 2x 150 MHz will be, as well.
    Reply
  • usertests
    Just don’t go expecting to see it pop up in the successor to the Raspberry Pi 5.
    I wouldn't be surprised to see RPT integrate their latest microcontroller chip, also containing these Hazard RISC-V cores, onto a Raspberry Pi 6. Some boards like the Radxa X4/X2L include an RP2040. As far as performance cores go, RPi will stick with ARM until the end of time.

    Machine learning might be the next thing Raspberry Pi tries to get into, but they could address that by improving the speed and number of PCIe lanes offered by the board. Then you get a HAT with M.2/PCIe, and connect a third-party AI accelerator.
    Reply
  • kd9pdp
    mwhannan74 said:
    Could someone help me understand how this MCU compare to something like the Teensy 4.0? I have been using Teensy boards for almost a decade and the 4 series comes with a 600 MHz ARM Cortex-M7 that is vastly superior to the pico. The Teensy is clearly a lot more expensive at $20, but it has full integration with the Arduino IDE. What is the benefit, besides cost, of the Pico? Thanks

    The teensy 4.1 is an NXP MIMXRT1062. It actually only costs $5 at volume (so 5x more expensive). The speed actually isn't that different, the RP2350 is slower, but you won't notice it unless you're doing some complicated edge machine learning.

    The rp2350 uses <10 microamps in dormant (RTC) power mode, the teensy's MCU uses 20 microamps. When in low power standby mode, the rp2350 uses <100 microamps, the teensy's MCU uses about 200. So the rp2350 will last 2x longer on battery, but is slower.

    Overall, for 5x more cost, the teensy's MCU will probably be 2-3 times faster. It also has more peripherals. The rp2350 is cheaper with 2x longer battery life and comes with PIO to add exotic peripherals.

    Each has a place. If you don't need the power, the rp2350 is great. If you also want to play with risc-v, you have that option with the pico as well
    Reply
  • Findecanor
    This CPU has performance somewhere between the Arm Cortex M0+ of the RP2040 and the Arm Cortex M33 of the RP2350.
    CoreMark / MHz scores:
    * ARM Cortex-M0 (RP2040): ~2.0
    * Hazard3 (RP2350): 3.81
    * ARM Cortex-M33 (RP2350): 4.09

    So, according to these numbers, combined with a faster clock speed, the Hazard3 cores are twice as fast as the cores in the RP2040, and almost as fast as the ARM cores in the RP2350.
    Reply
  • bit_user
    Findecanor said:
    CoreMark / MHz scores:
    * ARM Cortex-M0 (RP2040): ~2.0
    * Hazard3 (RP2350): 3.81
    * ARM Cortex-M33 (RP2350): 4.09

    So, according to these numbers, combined with a faster clock speed, the Hazard3 cores are twice as fast as the cores in the RP2040, and almost as fast as the ARM cores in the RP2350.
    Thanks for the info. I guess the next question would be how they compare on perf/W.
    Reply