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Comment by systemvoltage | Hacker News Reader

We've seen ESP8266 and ESP32 succeed tremendously in the maker space. We've yet to see widespread adoption in commercial and professional applications - that's coming, but I am surprised why IP for bluetooth/wifi is so expensive outside of Chinese chip makers? ST, NXP, Microchip, Renesas, etc. have really expensive SoCs - $15/chip and over. These giants seem to be sleeping. What's preventing them from competing with the Chinese?

Also, we have horrendous price gouging for memory. A mere 128k to 256k bump in memory spec on a microcontroller will send you back a $1.20 in chip price.

Is there some CCP-gov subsidy going on to capture the market? Espressif's ESP32 is such an extraordinary chip with 500kb+ memory and yet, it is an order of magnitude cheaper than anything close from western suppliers. What gives?

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The trick is that ESP* chips implement a lot of the stack in firmware. This saves a lot of IP in dedicated hardware that allows for price reduction, but has it’s drawbacks, mostly in terms of energy consumption.

There’s also a good amount of problems involved in having a non-auditable (non certified) piece of firmware running in a coprocessor that handles communications, and being closed source and Chinese doesn’t help.

The difference is generally that the maker space doesn’t need to be production ready.

By the way, Murata has modules on the ~6$ range (depending on what features you want)

Not only the radio is software, cores themselves, as I understand, are not hard macro, and I find it more surprising that such very generic synthesized chip is not an even bigger power hog.

Just throwing the entire design at the synthesizer these days seems to be pretty close to a collection of hand laid out hard macros. The synthesizer being a lot more aggressive about optimizing out signals that leave the macro (and downstream uses of those signals, so those global optimizations that are hard for a human to see) seems to make up for it's deficiencies with perfect local layout.

Wait what? You are telling me the ESP's are actually FPGA's with a preconfigured core?

> Is there some CCP-gov subsidy going on to capture the market?

Every chipmaker in China has a 10 year 100% income tax subsidy. Some of the earliest subsidy recipients are now passing that period, so they invented new schemes which are to the effect the same except for "go to technology park A, or factory park B."

Given this is an income tax, companies don't benefit much themselves if they are working on low margins, but it helps to lure in more companies who got themselves into stockmarket play.

As it is China, another factor is that company owner who is a sole shareholder/board head/CEO would've been taxed to oblivion if he were to simply give himself a giant salary to extract profits (60%-70%.)

When it all began, dividends were completely tax free, and there were no capital gains tax. Now they aren't, but the policy somehow continues to drive on the same rails.

I think it will be interesting to find out which product used ESP8266 based ESP-01 and -12E modules for their original intended purposes before it was “found”. They were meant to be low performance UART/SPI/I2C/SDIO... compatible “modem” to cheaply add Wi-Fi to some other product, probably some tablets or IoT home hub or appliance device.

They were already mass produced and available as factory leak/direct sale/replacement parts at dimes apiece, then were picked up by the guy who ported Arduino Core to it when he was looking for anything small and cheap that has Wi-Fi and are reprogrammable.

It could have been some Sierra Wireless UMTS or Intel Wi-Fi bgn or CSR Bluetooth, but the easiest he could tap onto was an 8266. I remember there was a guy showing demo doing what today one would do with M5Stack done on a classic miniPCI card in Maker Faire Tokyo like a decade ago, except notably the logo on the guy’s badge and laser etching on the chip kind of looked similar so that kind of future could have been possible but never materialized. Similarly I still have couple “Zero Channel RAID” cards somewhere that I dreamed of turning them into what Raspberry Pi is today. So a lot of these opportunities exist/ed but are/were neglected for the lack of interest to get over a chasm. Perhaps modern day equivalents to them are DRAM cached SSDs, some of them smell like penguins.

Espressif shipped 100M units by Jan 2, 2018. I’m not sure what they’ve shipped in the last 2.75 years, but I’d wager it’s at least another 100M.

That’s not just to makers for sure.

https://www.espressif.com/en/news/Espressif_Achieves_the_Hun...

You see them in a lot of home automation gear, like wifi power outlets

I probably have no idea what I'm talking about because I don't work in this space, but in a previous life, our company was looking at Nordic for chips, and they had some pretty solid offerings for bluetooth chips. IIRC it was around $5 per chip but I may be totally wrong. It was one of these I think, and it's been about 3 years since I looked into this https://www.nordicsemi.com/Products/Low-power-short-range-wi...

Nordic has some great parts and their tools and stack are first-rate. No WiFi though, last I looked anyhow.

Right. We particularly cared about Bluetooth 5 + USB, NFC and cryptography chip was a bonus.

> These giants seem to be sleeping. What's preventing them from competing with the Chinese?

Realtek has been selling the rtl8710 for a long time, however it seems like it never really caught on (there have been some experimentations with Rust on it in the hobbyist world, but that's all I know).

https://www.cnx-software.com/2016/07/28/an-alternative-to-es...

I was under the impression that tuya is moving from esp8266 to rtl8710 for their IoT ecosystem (which in turn includes many third parties, who buy their firmware + smartphone apps + cloud infrastructure from them). This primarily affects those who wish to flash tasmota on e.g. their wifi-controllable sockets.

Another board with interesting features that never caught up was the WiFiMCU, based on the EMW3165 SOC module by Mxchip.

http://www.wifimcu.com/ (Lua programmable just as the NodeMCU)

https://en.mxchip.com/modulelist

Until very recently ESP chips couldn't compete with Western chips you mentioned in various scenarios, and in some they're still out of the question. This is a gradual process though and Microchip & co. will try to keep the prices of their wiresless chips high as long as they can.

Yeah, it's interesting considering that supposedly engineers are not significantly cheaper in Chinese tech hubs compared to the West.

The Western chipmakers are being disrupted with chips that are good enough, not realizing that cheap price creates a new quality, enabling devices not possible before.

Sure, the firmware and SDK had some of bugs and missing features to iron out, but they came a long way since the release and now are solid enough to put devices like Sonoff inside your electrical boxes and walls.

We had issues with Simcom modem chips as well as Telit. The newer Simcom chips are better and quite competitive, pre Sim800 it was riddled with bugs. If then Telit was an option, now it isn't because it's considerably more expensive and the IoT market is very competitive. 3G chips were the worst pricewise because they had to include royalties to Qualcomm, that's why most chipmakers pushed for 4G.

The ESP family is absolutely amazing in terms of price and features, not so much efficeincy wise. It would have been great if RTOS support was better. The ESP-IDF is based on FreeRTOS, NuttX has some preliminary support, RiotOS doesn't do FPU, BT, crypto acceleration and uses one core only. NodeMCU is maker/hobby garde, not an OS and so is Arduino. To be fair, the whole ESP chip family is rather hobby grade but if it works and you're not power constrained or you use it as a secondary MCU and put it to sleep, it should be fine.

> NuttX has some preliminary support, RiotOS doesn't do FPU, BT, crypto acceleration and uses one core only.

As always, patches welcome ;)

Those RTOS projects don't have nearly as much developer resources as there are Chips, so there are always still low hanging fruits to be picked.

> Also, we have horrendous price gouging for memory. A mere 128k to 256k bump in memory spec on a microcontroller will send you back a $1.20 in chip price.

To be fair, the esp* chips don't have memory mapped on-chip flash but load the code from external SPI flash to RAM at startup.

While that solution is cheaper (and also faster due to executing from RAM) it adds a small delay at startup powering the large RAM uses more energy.

Esp8285 has 1MB integrated flash memory (2MB on one variant).

https://www.espressif.com/sites/default/files/documentation/...

it's build into the package, but it's still a separate die connected via SPI.

Yes, from a power standpoint that matters. From a BOM cost and PCB layout standpoint, it doesn't.

> What's preventing them from competing with the Chinese?

Greed

Walking through my local hardware store (in NZ) there's a bunch of cheap wifi controlled wall outlets - every one I've looked at has an esp8266 in it - maybe it's Trump's bogus trade war that's keeping them out of the US

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