[brucehoult]

There is no need to guess, they've SAID that the simple RISC-v cores they're designed for it don't have FPU or SIMD like the Arm M33 does (the previous Pico's CM0 didn't have either), and the RISC-V core does 3.81 Coremark per MHz while the M33 does 4.09, so a 7% difference there.

Of course both are much better than the previous Cortex-M0+'s 2.46 Coremark/MHz, plus more MHz also: 150 vs 133.

[vardump]

M33 does not have SIMD. No Helium or anything else.

DSP extensions are included, but those are all scalar.

[brucehoult]

Oh! I stand corrected. I read DSP and assumed that meant SIMD.

So what does "DSP" actually mean, in this context?

[vardump]

Some "SIMD"-like instructions are included (saturation, add, subtract, multiply), but they all use the scalar register file. So somewhere in between.