Raspberry PI has released their first MCU platform:
It is a dual core ARM mcu. It also has PIO (programmable IO state machines), which remind me of the PRUs in the AM35xx processors (I’ve never used either, so not sure how similar).
The PIOs seem like a very basic version of the PRUs. PRUs are very powerful, full on 200MHz RISC CPUs, arguably possibly more capable than the main Cortex-M0 cores found in the RP2040.
I don’t understand why the Raspberry Pi Foundation decided they needed their own microcontroller SoC. There’s already plenty of similar capability boards out there for comparable pricing. You can’t run Linux on a Cortex-M0 (at least not easily). And for just $1 more you get a full blown Linux board.