Should help to avoid bitbanging when implementing protocols like the 1-wire[1] protocol, or say generating IO pulse sequences for interfacing with non-standard ICs, like this linear CCD sensor[2].

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1-Wire

[2]: https://toshiba.semicon-storage.com/ap-en/semiconductor/prod... (page 7 in datasheet)

Any situation where you have tight timing requirements could benefit from this. The datasheet has several examples demonstrating how the PIO can be used to generate serial clocks based on data output.

The ability to have all inputs available to all state machines is really useful - they also mention a port of tensorflow lite to the board. So, one example would be preprocessing inputs for feeding directly into tensorflow applications, for ML at the edge (I think that's the buzzword bingo won there!).

With 360mb/s I/O bandwidth, that equates to more than FullHD at 60hz, with 16bit colour depth. If you attach say a rpi camera to the I/O you can do signal processing on the image. Same for VGA output.