Three years after the first Pico, Raspberry Pi is launching the second generation of its microcontroller board for small embedded projects: the Raspberry Pi Pico 2. The hardware step up rests on the brand-new RP2350 microcontroller, developed entirely in house.
In plain terms
A microcontroller is the small computer buried inside an electronic object, the one that runs its program. As a rule, a board locks in its processor family. The RP2350 carries two: the Arm family and the RISC-V family, whose instruction set is open. It is the developer who decides when the board boots, through a simple software configuration, and one core of each type can even run at the same time. On top of that come twice as much memory and extra hardware protections against fault injection. This is still a development board for embedded projects: choosing the architecture is an engineering decision, not a consumer setting.
The board at a glance
| Parameter | Value |
|---|---|
| Board | Raspberry Pi Pico 2, second generation |
| Previous generation | the first Pico, three years earlier |
| Microcontroller | RP2350, developed entirely in house |
| Architecture | dual-core, dual-architecture |
| Arm cores | dual-core ARM Cortex-M33 clocked at 150 MHz |
| RISC-V cores | open source dual-core RISC-V Hazard3 |
| Architecture selection | at boot, through a simple software configuration |
| SRAM | 520 KB, memory doubled |
| Flash memory | doubled |
| Hardware security | additional mitigation measures against fault injection |
| Intended use | small embedded projects |
The possible core combinations
| Configuration chosen at boot | What runs |
|---|---|
| All Arm | two ARM Cortex-M33 cores |
| All RISC-V | two RISC-V Hazard3 cores |
| Mixed | one Arm core and one RISC-V core, simultaneously |
What this changes
Doubling the SRAM and the flash memory leaves more headroom for complex machine code. The RP2350 also adds hardware security mitigation measures against fault injection.
Sources
References verified during the August 2026 fact-checking audit: these are the pages
against which the claims in this bulletin were checked.