A couple of years ago it was measured in bytes. Before the RP2040 is was measured in dozens of KiB now it's measured in MiB
While I agree that 16 MiB is on the larger side for now, it will only be a couple of years for mainstream MCUs having that amount on board
RP2040 is 264k, RP2350 is 520k.
I use NXP's rt1060 and rt1170 for work, and they have 1M and 2M respectively, still quite far away from 16M and those are quite beefy running at 500MHz - 1GHz.
These both have FlexSPI controllers capable of interfacing with $3-5 in PSRAM at 8M or 16M.
It really isn't. The RP2040 has 256KB RAM. Far away from 16MB.
>now it's measured in MiB
Where? Very few so far and mostly for image processing applications, and cap out at less than 8MB. And those are already bordering on SoCs instand of MCUs.
For applications where 8MB or more is needed, designers already use SoCs with external RAM chips.
>it will only be a couple of years for mainstream MCUs having that amount on board
Doubt very much. Clip it and let's see in 2 years who's right.
I'm an Erlang fanatic, and have been since forever, paid for classes when it was Erlang Training & Consulting at the center of things, flew cross-country to take them, have the t-shirt, hosted Erlang meetups myself in downtown Chicago. I'm not prototyping a microcontroller application in Erlang if I can get it done any other way. It's committing to losing from the outset.
edit: I've always been hopeful for some bare-metal implementation that would at least almost work for cheap µcs, and there have been promising attempts in the past, but they seem to have gone nowhere.