New Raspberry Pi Silicon and Boards (microcontrollers)
"It seems like every fruit company is making its own silicon these days, and we’re no exception. RP2040 builds on the lessons we’ve learned from using other microcontrollers in our products, from the Sense HAT to Raspberry Pi 400. It’s the result of many years of hard work by our in-house chip team." -- they said that.
Basically Raspberry Pi noticed that many people were pairing Raspberry Pis (pies?) with other microcontrollers such as Arduinos to be able to handle analog inputs and go to very low-power states. So they created their own MCU (TL;DR: dual Cortex M0+), a little board, and then worked with everyone in this industry to create their own little boards. Yes, there are 5+ boards on this article from Raspberry Pi and other vendors such as Adafruit, SparkFun, and Arduino.
Check it all at their blog
cc @Murilo Polese I think this is something for you.