> For its price, the ESP32-S3 is a powerhouse of a microcontroller.

Indeed, don't forget it is more powerful than computers like this one,

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amstrad_PC1512

That was my exact first computer with the CGA graphics, GEM Desktop, Locomotive Basic etc. All the software came in 4 360KB diskettes. The diskettes had each it's own beautiful color. There were 3 sample Basic programs that seemed to me quite advanced. One sample was a document management system. Another was a drawing program where you could draw with a mouse. Didn't know that GEM Desktop was made by Digital Reasearch. It was a very good windowing system. I believe it was based on MS-DOS. There was also a CP/M OS. So much software in only 1.2MB.

	▲	sedatk 7 minutes ago \| parent \| next [-]
		I dearly remember the keyboard's warm red Caps Lock light and my sessions of running Print Master and writing BASIC programs on it.
	▲	pjmlp an hour ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Exactly, thanks for sharing.

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MeteorMarc 44 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

We will see the day your toothbrush has more compute than the original IBM PC.

	▲	zimpenfish 34 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Pretty sure we have, e.g. [0], "TI's MSPM0Cx MCUs featuring Arm® Cortex®-M0+ core with 24 MHz CPU, 32-bit structure, 4 to 16 KB Flash provide cost-effective designs for electric toothbrush and shaver applications." - compared to the 5150[1], it's 4x the bus width, 5x the CPU clock, albeit with fewer RAMs. [0] https://www.ti.com/lit/ab/slaaeg0/slaaeg0.pdf [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Personal_Computer

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glouwbug an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

At 8mhz? I'd imagine it rivals at least the Pentium III

	▲	pavlov an hour ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Well, probably not, but maybe a plain Pentium? The Pentium III was a superscalar core that scaled up to 1.4 GHz. This microcontroller is max 240 MHz and does less work per cycle.
	▲	pjmlp an hour ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Probably, I was use this example because I feel youngers can't imagine how much we could do with such MS-DOS class computer, even within its limitations. So naturally an ESP32 can do so much more.