[wongarsu]

Your regular soldering station will also contain a microcontroller, same as a shocking amount of other tools. They can be incredibly cheap (a couple cents if you have enough volume), so even if you could do it with analog circuits they can be a reasonable solution. And of course this soldering iron comes with buttons and a display, so of course you use a microcontroller.

But I guess what you are getting at is that normally you don't brag about the architecture of your microcontroller. As you correctly suspect, that's done just for coolness points. Chances are an 8 bit AVR or an 16 bit PIC could have done the same thing, but on a soldering iron you don't care about the power draw of the microcontroller, and a 32bit RISC-V fits Pine64's brand better. It's the equivalent of "aircraft-grade aluminum" or "military-strength encryption".

Also the choice makes it easier to run Doom on it.

[xjidjccudux]

Regular soldering stations don't contain microcontrollers, they use a thermocouple to decide if the circuit should flow through the iron or not and some other smaller stuff to smooth out the temp gain / ensure the overshoot doesn't get too wild.