I wonder what other uses people will find for it. It's one-way data transfer, I wonder if it could be hooked up to a USB 2.0 or USB 3.0 peripheral, or an ethernet PHY, or something else.
Pretty sure I'm going to link it up with an FPGA at some point - as long as the data is unidirectional, this is a promise of 2400 Mbit/sec - which for a $1 microcontroller is insane. If it overclocks like the processor, you're up to 4800 MBit/sec ... stares into the distance
I can use PIO in the other direction, but this has DDR, so you'll never get the same performance. It's a real shame they didn't make it bi-directional, but maybe the use-case here is (as hinted by the fact it can do TMDS internally) for DVI out.
If they had make it bidirectional, I could see networks of these little microcontrollers transmitting/receiving at gigabit rates... Taken together with PIO, XMOS would have to sit up straight pretty quickly...
Right? Bidirectional capability at those speeds would be incredible for the price of this chip.
Either way, still looking forward to see what people cook up with it, and hopefully I'll find a use for it as well. Maybe combine it with some cheap 1920x1080 portable monitors to have some beautiful dashboards around the house or something...
1920x1080 30 Hz DVI would require running RP2350 at least at 311 MHz ((1920 * 1080 * 30Hz * 10) / 2). Probably a bit more to account for minimal horizontal and vertical blanking etc. Multiplier 10 comes from 8b10b encoding.
To fit in 520 kB of RAM, the framebuffer would need to be just 1 bpp, 2 colors (1920 * 1080 * 1bpp = 259200 bytes).
From PSRAM I guess you could achieve 4 bpp, 16 colors. 24-bit RGB full color would be achievable at 6 Hz refresh rate.
I guess you might be able to store framebuffer as YUV 4:2:0 (=12 bits per pixel) and achieve 12 Hz refresh rate? The CPU might be just fast enough to compute YUV->RGB in real time. (At 1920x1080@12Hz 12 clock cycles per pixel per core @300 MHz.)
(Not sure whether the displays can accept very low refresh rates.)
