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Wow! Really pushes the capability of the RP2040 to add a Memory Management Unit for the external RAM and incorporate DMA and a VGA display. The PIO on this chip is amazingly flexible.


Seriously!

“ The PSRAM/HyperRAM PIO engine provides 42/32 MB/s (write/read) of memory bandwidth. Further, four PIO engines are used to provide four seperate read/write memory ports. This allows independent memory access for the emulated CPU, video DMA, and receive/send Ethernet traffic.”


Even more interesting, the PIO-based memory controller is faster than the one in DECstation 3100!


I just looked up what PIO was in the context of the RP2040 and... wow.

They're like general-purpose Amiga Coppers. You can program them to control I/O lines and they will just do the I/O, independent of the CPU.

This emulator is probably just the beginning of really cool things that will be built with the Raspberry Pi Pico.


Well the RP2040 was released over 3 years ago... there have already been many interesting things that have been built with the capabilities. I wouldn't call this just the beginning.




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