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by picture 222 days ago
I have read the docs, and like I said the point of STM32 is ubiquity. It's not a great design in other respects but it was once ahead of the envelope and that made it ubiquitous which made it king for longevity. There is no room for another "king" on that throne. Especially counting all the clones of STM32, it is basically a forever design.

Comparing a 60 cent chip to a 10 cent chip is itself crazy work. That's like a whole three stratums apart in terms of capability. Dammingly, you are forgetting about the cost of the external flash that it requires, when program flash is the main cost of MCUs. It shows you don't have much experience with this stuff.

> I see no mention of exact part number of inductor requirement in their hardware design guide, are you making shit up now?

LMFAO go read the literal datasheet page 455 https://datasheets.raspberrypi.com/rp2350/rp2350-datasheet.p...

They literally had to "work with Abracon to create a custom 2.0×1.6mm 3.3μH polarity marked inductor" like wtf

Besides how it looks like you weren't one of the early adopters (since RPi shipped one abracon inductor with every one RP2350 for a bit), you also clearly haven't designed a board with the chip in question.

> theoretical maximum of 3.2 gigabytes per second bandwidth. That is pretty crazy.

This is what I'm talking about, like honestly what capability does that unlock for you beside party tricks? Can you name anything meaningful beside "logic analyzer" and "some memory card?" Even disregarding that, what can you do with such thruput if you are bottled by USB 1 speeds and a core without FPU? It doesn't come close to being able to do interesting things like LVDS ADCs or actual high speed memory interfaces because of the bit width requirement, yet people will go into a frothing frenzy should you dare insinuate that RPi Pico might be kinda useless

> rp2040/rp2350 are unironically one of the best MCUs on the market (esp. in their niche), both in documentation/API and price/perf and features/flexibility in doing highspeed interfaces/bandwidth.

As you might surmise, I disagree. Go make some actual projects instead of "reading the docs" all day (though I must admit I do the same). Also, it sure looks like our definition of high speed differs by a wide margin

1 comments

> Dammingly, you are forgetting about the cost of the external flash that it requires, when program flash is the main cost of MCUs. It shows you don't have much experience with this stuff.

If you had any experience "with this stuff", you'd know 16mbit of QSPI flash (compatible with rp2040) costs 7-8 cents in volume. 64mbits 12cents or less. And would calm your tits. It is okay.

> Besides how it looks like you weren't one of the early adopters

If you had any experience "with this stuff" you'd know better than to buy reels of mcus on rev1/rev2 that haven't been on the market for atleast a year or two.

> bottlenecked by a core without FPU

Why would lack of FPU impact bandwidth? Lack of FPU is non-issue with fixed point math in most cases.

> I have read the docs, and like I said the point of STM32 is ubiquity

And yet during chip shortages, rp2040 were one of the few MCUs without stock issues or crazy prices... in fact, I've never seen it out of stock. STM32 on the other hand... ouch. Fun times!

>This is what I'm talking about, like honestly what capability does that unlock for you beside party tricks?

So every capability and use-case that doesn't tickle your zoomer sensibilities is a party trick?

Okay.