Onboard WiFi Chip powerful than RP2040 itself?! Raspberry Pico W

Raspberry Pico W is the Raspberry Pi's first microcontroller board with Wi-Fi. The only visible difference between a Raspberry Pico and Pico W is the silver color shield as shown below.

Twitter User @arturo182 desoldered the shield for all of us to see the cool looking circuitry beneath. Check it out below

Obviously, as mentioned in the product description, we can see the Infineon™ CYW43439 WiFi/BT Chip beneath the Shield.

But the curious thing is that this WiFi Chip is more powerful than the RP2040 itself. It's funny to see that the main MCU is less powerful than the Wireless connectivity chip.

The CYW43439 WiFi/BT Chip has a Cortex M3 with 512 KB SRAM and 640 KB ROM, Compared to the Cortex M0+ with 264KB SRAM in the RP2040. The Bluetooth block of the Infineon Chip even has its own Cortex-M4, which is a M3 with additional DSP commands.

While the CYW43439 might not reach the 240MHz of an ESP32, it's sure more powerful than the RP2040.

Learn more about the Infineon™ CYW43439 WiFi/BT Chip here: https://www.infineon.com/cms/en/product/wireless-connectivity/airoc-wi-fi-plus-bluetooth-combos/cyw43439/

Datasheet of RP2040 for comparison: https://datasheets.raspberrypi.com/rp2040/rp2040-datasheet.pdf