[Oberon] Announcement: Oberon for the Raspberry Pi Pico and Pi Pico 2

[Chris Burrows]

We recently released Astrobe for RP2040 which can be used to write Oberon
software to run on the Raspberry Pi Pico microcontroller boards. This will
be followed up later this month by the release of Astrobe for RP2350 which
targets the new Raspberry Pi Pico 2 boards. For more details see the
Astrobe forum announcement:

https://www.astrobe.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=799

The RP2040 is based on an Arm Cortex-M0+ processor whereas the RP2350 uses
the more powerful Arm Cortex-M33 design. During testing we came up with the
following performance comparison:

https://www.astrobe.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=19&t=803

The test program that we ran was originally written in Modula-2 by Wirth
for his Lilith computer. It is documented in Appendix 2 of the *ETH Report
Nr 40 - The Personal Computer Lilith* (The Yellow Report). Apr 1981. N.
Wirth which you can download from:

https://www.astrobe.com/Modula2/

The results shown there indicate (taken with a huge grain of salt) that the
Pi Pico is ~ 50x faster, and the Pi Pico 2 is ~ 100x faster than a Lilith.

The price comparison of the systems is even more impressive at ~ 5000x:

The Lilith cost ~ $US 8000 (~ $US 25,000 today) whereas you can get a Pi
Pico 2 for $US 5

Regards,
Chris Burrows

--
CFB Software
https://www.astrobe.com
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