Basic Interpreter Hidden in ESP32 Silicon

So this is in the mask ROM on the chip...?

Can anyone comment on how many dollars it cost them to include this? Mask rom isn't particularly cheap, and historically companies have gone to great lengths to shave tens or hundreds of bytes from their first stage bootloaders that live in ROM...

Seems odd to find an apparent big dollar-waster in a mass market low cost device.

Yes, but no.

The big cost saver is doing one design, mass-mass-mass producing it, and then limiting its functionality per market segment.

The boot roms in ESP chips are not particularly small anyway, aside from bootup and flashing functionality, they also embed radio functions for WIFI, Bluetooth, Zigbee/Thread, printf implementations, MD5 functions and more.

The ESP32 has 448KB of ROM that embeds most of newlibc as well as wireless drivers and part of the bluetooth stack.

From past experience I can say that tinybasic can go down to about 3-4KB in size.

So it was probably "free" in that they had already decided on a rom size to embed and they had some space left.

(2016)?

October 27, 2016