Our First Assembly Language Program
Stephen E. P. Smith · Apress eBooks · 2021
Most of the functionality of a Raspberry Pi Pico is contained in the custom RP2040 chip that contains dual core ARM Cortex-M0+ CPUs. The ARM processor was originally developed by a group in Great Britain, who wanted to build a successor to the BBC Microcomputer used for educational purposes. The BBC Microcomputer used the 6502 processor, which was a simple processor with a simple instruction set. The problem was there was no successor to the 6502. They weren’t happy with the microprocessors that were around at the time, since they were much more complicated than the 6502 and they didn’t want to make another IBM PC clone. They took the bold move to design their own. They developed the Acorn computer that used it and tried to position it as the successor to the BBC Microcomputer. The idea was to use Reduced Instruction Set Computer (RISC) technology as opposed to Complex Instruction Set Computer (CISC) as championed by Intel and Motorola.