I can see trying to validate the die and all of it's functionality being a real problem - there's just so much packed in there.
You're in luck with the 8051, there are still plenty of those cores out there in micros.
What I don't understand with the Pico devices is - why keep pushing it like that? Microcontrollers tend to find a niche and stay that way for years. What are they trying to find with constantly pushing harder to make bigger faster devices? What does this do that the original Pico device couldn't? Pushing too hard is going to do exactly this - you put out something that's full of problems and everyone gets a bad taste in their mouth. You're now scared and either become overly cautious and hidebound, or so fearful that you're going to miss something that you do.
Microcontrollers can be a 10 year development cycle and no one will care except for the "makers" who will whine about not having a new shiny to play with. Industry is still using 30 year old, 12-bit designs - and not having any problem with them. I'm thinking that the Pi foundation isn't fully understanding what they're playing with here.
Totally agree. I hardly use any of the capabilities of current u-controllers. Seriously, 32-bits? And now quad cores? Edge devices don't need to be fast. I'd argue that 8-bit or 16-bit cores are capable enough. And then a couple of megahertz of clock speed is quite sufficient.
As the clock speed is increased, power consumption goes up. I'd rather see a 16-bit 100 Mhz core loaded with IO, ADCs, DACs, I2C, SPI and serial ports. That's all.
Personally, I've mostly gone to the Espressif side. Yea, they still have problems. Mostly I don't like how the ADC works: it's not very linear. The IO seems to be solid.
PI, I believe caters to the maker crowd and is trying to keep the Chinese knock offs out. Again, the hardware is quite capable already so they could focus more on making the hardware reliable and lower the power requirements. No need for more cores.
I had some problems with Espressif's devices and RF noise, but that's a "me" problem.
The place I'm with now is updating a device, and we're sticking with the same 8-bit core with a 12-bit ADC. It just has more memory so we can put newer output protocols on the device. There's literally no need for anything faster.
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