Raspberry Pi Unveils the Pico 2, Powered by the Dual-Architecture Quad-Core RP2350

Raspberry Pi has announced a follow-up to its smash-hit RP2040 dual-core microcontroller, in the form of the quad-core dual-architecture RP2350 — and a shiny new Raspberry Pi Pico 2 to serve as a quick-start development platform.

"Raspberry Pi Pico 2 is our new $5 microcontroller board, built on RP2350: our new high-performance, secure microcontroller," the company says of its latest launch. "With a higher core clock speed, double the on-chip SRAM, double the on-board flash memory, more powerful Arm cores, optional RISC-V cores, new security features, and upgraded interfacing capabilities, Raspberry Pi Pico 2 delivers a significant performance and feature boost, while retaining hardware and software compatibility with earlier members of the Raspberry Pi Pico series."

Officially, the Raspberry Pi RP2350 is a "dual-core" part, but there are four processor cores present on the chip: two 32-bit Arm Cortex-M33 cores running at 150MHz, a boost over the Cortex-M0+ cores of the original RP2040, along with two 32-bit RISC-V cores based on the free and open source Hazard3 design. The trick: the microcontroller isn't designed to have all four cores running at once; instead, users are expected to pick between the Cortex-M33 or Hazard3 cores depending on their use-case, or — optionally — run one of each with shared memory access.

The new microcontroller also boasts 520kB of on-chip static RAM (SRAM), almost twice that of the RP2040, though still no on-chip flash; the Raspberry Pi Pico 2 comes with 4MB of on-board quad-SPI flash as a result, while the chip itself supports up to 16MB with an optional chip-select offering support for another 16MB of flash or pseudo-static SRAM (PSRAM).

There are 26 3.3V-logic 5V-tolerant general-purpose input/output (GPIO) pins brought out to castellated 0.1" headers, including two each of UART, SPI, and I2C buses, a USB 1.1 controller and PHY supporting both host and device operation, and 12 programmable input/output (PIO) state machines. Four of the 26 pins are connected to an analog to digital converter (ADC), while there are 24 pulse-width modulation (PWM) channels available. The USB port, for data and power, remains a micro-USB connector, for reasons of backwards-compatibility.

Raspberry Pi is making much of new security features in the RP2350, too, which implements Arm's TrustZone for Cortex-M to offer signed boot, 8kB of one-time programmable memory for key storage, a hardware true random number generator (TRNG), hardware mitigations against fault injection attacks, and SHA-256 acceleration.

"These features, including the secure boot ROM, are extensively documented and available to all users without restriction," the company says. "This transparent approach, which contrasts with the 'security through obscurity' offered by legacy vendors, allows professional users to integrate RP2350, and Raspberry Pi Pico 2, into products with confidence."

As with the earlier RP2040 and the original Raspberry Pi Pico and Pico W boards, the RP2350 on the Raspberry Pi Pico 2 can be programmed using either the official C/C++ software development kit (SDK) or Raspberry Pi's port of MicroPython. Some features, like a new built-in high-speed transmission (HSTX) peripheral that aims to deliver DVI/DSI display support without tying up the CPU cores or PIO blocks, may only be available through the C/C++ SDK at launch.

Engineer Dmitry Grinberg has published thoughts on the RP2350, after working with the device in secret over the past year — and having developed the firmware for the DEFCON 32 badge, which is powered by the chip. "It seems like I got almost all of my wishes granted with RP2350," he writes.

"[The Arm CPU] overclocks insanely well," Grinberg continues. "I’ve been running the device at 300MHz in all of my projects with no issues at all! You can now use the FIFOs as memory, randomly reading and writing them, allowing all sorts of wicked-cool PIO machinery that previously was not possible due to lack of enough temporaries. DMA can now do infinite transfers without needing to waste another channel. QSPI PSRAM is supported!"

The Raspberry Pi Pico 2 is available to order from authorized resellers at $5 in individual-unit pricing; for production use, 480-unit reel quantities are available. Pricing for the RP2350 chip on its own, which is available in two footprints the largest of which offers 48 GPIO pins, 24 PWM channels, and eight ADCs, had not been announced at the time of writing, but the company has confirmed plans to launch a Raspberry Pi Pico 2 W with integrated radio module by the end of the year.

Raspberry Pi has confirmed variants of the chip which include stacked flash memory, making external flash unnecessary for the first time in the chip family's history: the 60-pin RP2350A and 80-pin RP2350B are both available in RP2354A and RP2354B variants, which include a 2MB flash die stacked on top. More information is available on the Raspberry Pi website.