>> And the CPU even has SIMD instructions!

Yes, but it looks like there is no hardware floating point. The description of the CORDIC module indicates fixed-point calculations, which is consistent with the lack of any reference to floating point.

I am happy the have CAN-FD and Motor PWM module, but nowhere did I see conversion times listed for the ADC. For motor control I demand 1uS conversion time or less, and in the last year I've switched from fixed point to floating point after holding off on that switch for ~15 years.

Curious: What does the "imac" stand for in the architecture target name ?

The sooner ARM and its closed ecosystem dies, the better. The era of shitty half working blobs has gone on for quite long enough.

Nice. Been meaning to try rust on these sort of devices but the riscv I saw thus far seemed to be mixed arm and riscv which seemed weird

very interesting, do you have a pointer with more info on what kind of SIMD support it has?

You're fundamentally misunderstanding how MCU families work, I'm afraid.

There's not 10+ versions with different features. The word version strongly implies that there's an incremental progression over time, and they keep screwing up by adding and taking away modules. What jerks!

What's actually happening is that you have 4-5 different product lines that all share the same SDK, design philosophy, pricing structure, supply chain and support channels. Each one of these dimensions is extremely important to engineering teams designing products around them. It's not about hobbyists who are learning the ropes, although IMO they do a pretty good job of supporting those folks, too.

Within those lines (at this point, primarily S, C, H and P) you actually do have versions; for example, ESP32-S2 is no longer recommended for new designs because you should use ESP32-S3.

Ultimately, the lens you need to use to understand this stuff is: can I place an ESP32-labeled chip on my PCB and program it using the same SDK?

The same is true for the RP2XXX series of MCUs; if someone is confused by the difference between a microcontroller and a SBC then they might just be in the wrong place.

Bigger picture, some advice: when confronted by something like this, you will get further faster if you don't lead with the assumption that you have things figured out and everyone else is doing it wrong. Instead, keep an open mind and ask lots of questions. We're living in a golden era of enabling autodidacts but that's only true for folks who go long on humble curiosity.

But it's the same scheme as STM32, EFM32, GD32, …

It signals ESP-IDF compatibility

It's like these for other families too, you've got your STM32, then you can get the sub-models ranging from entry-level STM32C0 to the full Linux chips like the STM32MP2, with lots of options in the middle

I kind of wish these all weren't called ESP32. ESP8266 and ESP8285 -> ESP32 made sense, but now we have 10+ different version

They've been hanging around with Sony.

Apple: AirPods

Sony: WMDF559J649Q-1

Showing up in search results, or in this day and age LLM results, is still king. If your famous product is known as the ESP32, it doesn't hurt sales to spin other products off the same line. It might hurt clarity, glance value and many other things, but it will drive people to you.

it's a marketing thing now

And toss away the brand name ?

I do a lot of LED projects too but I just use ws2812s. What do you need the controller for? Large brightness perhaps? Just curious.

cr.yp.to/ is also a pretty cool URL, and has been around for a looong time

Dang would love to have both in the same chip.

How does wired internet technically work on these chips? Is it just 8 dedicated GPIO pins?

Is there any reason you want wireless? Bluetooth audio is a disaster, AFAIK. You don't want to use it for music. Just go wired, the ether is too cramped already.

Low latency in Bluetooth audio comes down to codecs and the best are proprietary.

If you want to really cut down latency and need wireless with hardware like this, you could use a second ESP32 and send your own bitstream between them.

> I'm interested in audio out because I dabble in musical instruments.

Sorry, I don't know. I'm just responding to echo and expand on another reply that Bluetooth for anything related to serious music, from audio playback to MIDI input is a dumpster fire on Windows.

Several years ago I tried to set up a high-end Windows laptop for hobby DAW composition on the go. The real-world BT audio latency just from laptop to headphones/earbuds was unworkable and, separately, the input latency from BT midi controllers was unworkable. Stacked together the total lag was laughable.

At the time, the issues were widely known and much lamented. Some tech blogs (including one at MSFT) indicated there were issues at every level of the stack (drivers, firmware, silicon) and work was proceeding to address the end to end shit show. The only workable Windows solutions referenced online involved using specific non-Bluetooth wireless devices. Needing to have a dedicated USB dongle hanging off the laptop combined with having a choice of either one specific device or a receiver dongle to support all devices, is less appealing than just having a wire.

Since then I've looked again every year or so but have seen no reports yet of meaningful progress and there's even less discussion of work in progress. Very disappointing. And the situation on the BT audio quality side doesn't seem much better. If you don't want degraded audio quality it's either choosing very specific devices which support a proprietary BT codec or switching to non-BT wireless dongle hardware. At least there is talk of improvement on audio quality but no clear indication better baseline minimum audio quality will ever be mandated in the BT audio standard.

If anyone has info the baseline latency or quality (input or output) of standard BT devices in Windows configs will improve, I'd be delighted to hear it.

Can it cope with TLS? The esp32 having a viable TLS stack has been a big win

Regarding specifically depth anything: You're not running this on a microcontroller. In general, CNNs still reign supreme on microcontrollers since you have a way lower peak memory demand which is what usually kills you. Here in this case you have a couple of _kilobytes_ of SRAM, potentially extendable to a couple of megabytes of PSRAM.

Even for small CNNs you often need to do some quite complex interleaving of layers (i.e. running parts of layer 1 and layer 2 in parallel interleaved to take advantage of the downsampling of CNNs) to keep performance and memory impact reasonable (see e.g. https://openreview.net/pdf?id=2O8qbyxH6X).

Think more "image classifier" less "run an image to image transformer". For depth anything, a single layer's activation is probably significantly larger than the available SRAM (I think it is (224/16)^2 patches each with activations [48, 96, 192, 384] for depth anything small: You aren't running this.)

I was wondering this as well. What exactly makes this a good AI chip vs others.

Unless they're not listing a major feature in their spec, a dual core 320Mhz microcontroller is not bad but youre not going to be running any kind of vision model on it, at least very fast.

Memory is the main constraint. You have what, 8mb of psram.

Compute wise you can manage. You can do quantisation and run a small 10-15 layer CNN perhaps. Image classification is possible. Keep in mind the channel count and input resolution cannot be high since memory will be a problem. You can maybe do face _detection_, "is my cat on my keyboard" classification as well maybe.

Audio, you can do a lot more. Wake word detection happens on _much_ smaller accelerators inside iphones. In this one you can do slightly heavier classifications. Maybe speaker identification "which member of family" or maybe "which dog is barking"

nope. not happening. at most YOLO or mayyybe FastDepth

As I understand it, Z-Wave is substantially more closed/proprietary. Both Thread and Zigbee are protocols that run on top of 802.15.4, which Espressif already has in other products.

I don't know for sure but Bluetooth, WiFi and Zigbee are on the same frequency band. Z-Wave is not.

(at least in the US, not sure about other countries)

This device only has a 2.4GHz radio. Z-Wave is sub-1GHz.

Z-Wave is completely different from Zigbee. Different frequency bands, modulation, etc.

And there are still just two suppliers of Z-Wave radios, as far as I know. I haven't bothered to re-check recently. Up until ~2022 there was just _one_ supplier, you could open any Z-Wave device and find exactly the same chip. Sometimes on a cute little daughter board.

Typically you look for a development board with the chip embedded on it. The dev board will have a usbc port and multiple pins that can be routed to LEDs, miniscreens, audio devices, etc. To program it you can usually use Lua (a very simple embedded language, almost JS-like) or you can use C/Rust/Zig as well. Arduino IDE works for it, too. You code from desktop and upload ROMs via USBC.

You can plug the dev board into sandwich board for easier prototyping. To go to mass production, you'll need to hand off your prototype spec to a custom PCB maker that you can order from, prices vary a lot based on volume and some shops specialize in low volume for early products.

Your end product should basically be a circuit board, case, battery, and any external components like LEDs or screens, then you assemble with plugs or wiring/soldering.

It is sometimes possible to make a product from the dev boards, especially the small ones, but your product still has to get a custom FCC certification (not a deal breaker, just a hoop to jump through), whether using dev board or custom.

S has never implied Xtensa, and C doesn't imply RISC-V. That's a widely held misunderstanding. S, C, P, etc. are product categories, not ISAs. S devices are high performance SoCs; large feature set, high frequency, not the lowest power or cost.

Just appending 1 to S3 is odd though. This MCU is step change for Espressif. S4 or something would make more sense.

I am concerned by all chips and software made by giant corporations. None of them are trustable, and any one of them will sell me out for a buck.

We must constantly fight to have open source and audited chips and software made in commodity fashion.

For what its worth, Espressif chips are open source, but yes, I wouldn't run national security or government devices on these.

Edit: I take it back on OS comment, they are not OS but some components of the SDK are:

https://zeus.ugent.be/blog/23-24/open-source-esp32-wifi-mac/

Apparently available on AliExpress as a dev board[0]

[0] "ESP32-S31-Korvo-1 Development Board Espressif System AI Intelligent Multimedia Development Board Engineering Sample" for £54.79 from the (allegedly official) Espressif store at https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005012333744553.html

The dev boards are already up for sale. I'm personally looking forward to the modules being stocked on LCSC, no idea when though.

Better connectivity. The Nucleo 144 only has 100mbit ethernet, as far as I can tell, but the new ESP chip has gigabit, along with wireless.

WiFi+BLE?

if it were American it probably would have been hostile-takeovered by Qualcomm or someone else and tightened down long ago.

Theoretically, yeah. Though at 320Mhz, with only 2.4ghz wireless, even with two cores, I doubt it's going to get anywhere near the throughput to fill the gigabit connection.