Interesting deep dive into the peripherals on the Bao and also talking about how PIO work
It’s quite a fun little chip. Currently working on a design with it which is being ported from an RP2350 one. Open silicon too - which is my jam, nowadays.
What’s really interesting is that it’s piggybacking on Crossbar’s Daric chip which has a M7 core on there in addition to the RV ones (the M7 is turned off on Baochip) . A combo of the M7 and the smaller RV cores gets quite interesting as is the MMU.
Encrypted swap and a rust native os was what drove us to make the switch from the 2350 to this since a lot of the Fancy Programmable Cryptography Code we’ve been working on nowadays (Fully Homomorphic Encryption on embedded devices, Zero Knowledge proofs on embedded devices) is rust native 
Theres this issue : Crossbar’s new security chip isn’t actually secure. But assuming a good software workaround can be found I would still be quite happy
The 2350 aint without flaws either - https://www.raspberrypi.com/news/security-through-transparency-rp2350-hacking-challenge-results-are-in/ .
All in all - strongly recommend that folks try out the chip ! We liked baochip enough that prerelease silicon (A0 stepping) was enough to convince us to design in for mass prod and I strongly recommend folks pick it up to at least play with
Such a great write up. I do believe that IO processors are a big deal, it is already amazing what people have made with RP2040 and RP2350.