Raspberry Pi RP2040 officially retails for only 1 USD

This is a chip developed by Raspberry Pi itself, and first launched earlier this year with the Raspberry Pi Pico microcontroller circuit, which is also very good price, only $ 4.

According to the manufacturer's description, the RP2040 is the perfect mid-range microcontroller that stands out in three ways: It has two fast CPU cores, plenty of RAM, and flexible I/O. The RP2040 comes with two ARM Cortex-M0+ cores clocked at 133MHz, allowing code to run in parallel with hardware monitoring. At the same time, this chip also owns 264KB of RAM, which means that users will not need to spend time optimizing their code.

Discussing the flexible I/O capabilities of the RP2040, Raspberry Pi Trading CEO, Eben Upton, said:

'We offer all the usual connectivity interfaces: hardware UART, SPI and I2C controllers, USB 1.1 and four-channel ADC. But it is the programmable I/O (PIO) subsystem that makes the RP2040 stand out, allowing software implementations for protocols including SDIO, DPI, I2S and even DVI- D'.

In order to get the RP2040 on shelves immediately, Raspberry Pi decided to take 40,000 products off the supply chain and sell them as individual units. In the future, there will be more individual batches of RP2040 shipped, but basically the Raspberry Pi side still needs time to clear Pico's inventory and scale up production for the RP2040 chip.

Marvin Fry

Update 02 June 2021