Here's a quote from Eben Upton (CEO of Raspberry Pi Trading, 2023):
“We know what people don’t like about [RP]2040,” Upton admitted at the event, “the [Arm Cortex-]M0+ [architecture], could have more RAM, could have more GPIO [General-Purpose Input/Output], and we know what people do like — the PIO [Programmable Input/Output blocks]… and we have a chip team.”, [0][1]
Sounds good to me. The decision to go for two tiny cores rather than one beefier core with an FPU was strange, and it would be nice to have a PSRAM interface like the ESP32s do. They seem to want to have one chip SKU which does everything rather than a million variants, hence why they made the flash external on the RP2040, so if they can extend that to one chip which can be configured with variable flash size, memory size, and has tons of PIOs...
> The decision to go for two tiny cores rather than one beefier core with an FPU was strange
It's very useful to dedicate an entire core to running your timing-critical assembly code, and only run higher level non timing critical application code on the other core.
“We know what people don’t like about [RP]2040,” Upton admitted at the event, “the [Arm Cortex-]M0+ [architecture], could have more RAM, could have more GPIO [General-Purpose Input/Output], and we know what people do like — the PIO [Programmable Input/Output blocks]… and we have a chip team.”, [0][1]
That doesn't sound too bad, hmm?
[0] https://blog.adafruit.com/2023/12/04/raspberry-pi-hints-at-n...
[1] https://www.hackster.io/news/eben-upton-hints-at-an-rp2040-s...