In case anyone cares about this sort of thing. I find it cool.
Teensy 4.0 is announced:
- NXP iMXRT1062 Cortex M7 MCU, 1024k ram (512k tightly coupled, i.e. on a special fast internal bus that allows 2 accesses in the same cycle), 2048k flash, RNG, RTC, crypto acceleration, ports and timers galore. Includes many analog in and PWM out (no true analog out), CAN, USB host, SDIO, etc. SPDIF audio in and out. FPU supports single and double precision and has transcendentals.
- Same form factor as Teensy 3.2 (0.7*1.4 inch), mostly compatible pinout, similar price ($20).
- Uses 100 mA current (3.3v) at 600 mhz. Supposedly fastest microcontroller available today, whatever that means. I calculate 166 ?A/MHz which is decent, probably beating most Cortex M4's in compute efficiency because of the M7's superscalar capability. But the Ambiq M4's at 6(!) ?A/MHz are in a different class of low power if you don't mind 48 mhz speed.
- more details and benchmarks:
In raw speed and capacity this is slower and more limited than a $5 Raspberry Pi Zero, but it's smaller, lower powered, uses MCU-style programming rather than Linux, has lots of analog I/O (Raspberry has none), etc. So it's better suited than the Raspberry for realtime and mixed signal applications.
The Pocket Beagle is bigger, more power hungry, and costs a bit more ($25?), but has comparable I/O and a pair of on-chip realtime coprocessors, so it may also be of interest.
Overall I don't have an immediate use for one of these, but I appreciated seeing the announcement and think it's nice to know about. It will be great for MicroPython and maybe overkill for Forth.