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Comment by jsheard | Hacker News Reader

The P4 doesn't have a built-in radio though, so if you want those beefy RISC-V cores you will need to integrate a second ESP32 just to handle WiFi/BT :(

It will have USB-OTG and an LCD driver at least, which so far have been missing from all of their RISC-V parts.

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I think that’s totally fine. Might actually be the future direction. But yea would’ve been nice to have wifi/bt integrated.

Eg if you want 5ghz then use c5, or if you want some wifi-6 so c6, etc.

Also here’s a talk by them on how to use esp as a wifi coprocessor https://youtu.be/g14aEjnjRLw?si=TgkEyJJ2_L_Shuom

There’s also adafruit airlift https://www.adafruit.com/product/4201

> I think that’s totally fine. Might actually be the future direction.

Using a second board just for WiFi is definitely not totally fine for most applications. Having everything integrated into a single package important for everything from reducing BOM count to lower power consumption to development simplicity.

Cost optimization aside, that has always been the best way to use an ESP chip. Just go with one of their barebone models wired up as a peripheral to an ARM or RISC mcu.

Yet it’s possible to build some incredible applications on top of just ESP32, especially with extra RAM.

We use esp32-s3 at my company (smart speaker) but we don't don anything fancy.

Can you explain this? Why use esp as a peripheral if you already have an ARM chip?

We were considering moving off of esp to something that would make it easier do cpu-bound AI inference on-device or to enable more advanced audio DSP algos.

Based on cost and development time, it’s usually just easier to add an ESP and communicate to it using a generic SPI library or something than to add a radio to your PCB and get vendor libraries working on an arbitrary platform.

Without the builtin radio it's really hard to justify the use of an ESP32 over, say, an STM32. The integrated small package with "everything" to make a fun project is the whole appeal.

Espressif has a huge advantage in lead times over ST recently. I migrated a few projects over because ST couldn't or wouldn't give us supply in under a month when you could buy ESP chips and have them on your doorstep practically overnight.

Did you look at chinese STM clones? We used gd32, I liked it.

Wide product range. ARM and RISC-V all called GD32 with an extra letter for the exact line.

Depends if you want to condone IP theft (compatible independent developments is of course different but I'm not sure this is the case). R&D, Support, good documentation in English and accuracy of specs come at a price.

Is implementing the same peripheral register API really IP theft?

No, this was my remark about being compatible.

Espressif is Chinese company, just like gigadevices.

I don't think they do IP theft from STM32 (if it's even possible at current node size). They have very thorough datasheets different from STM32 ones and their own SDK with unique code (although it seems to be inspired by STM32 libraries, but absolutely not theft).

Nobody said that espressif steals IP from ST.

I don't think expressif steals from ST. I m quite sure GD steals from ST (source: ST themselves, see answer from ST in https://www.th3dstudio.com/2021/08/03/gd32-cpu-license-issue...)

If they didn't copy the peripheral blocks, then all they did was implement the ARM IP just like ST Micro did in a way to be pin to pin compatible with the STM32 chips. Happy to learn otherwise. I wouldn't put them in a real product for many reasons but this is not one of them.

That's a big differentiator - it's surprising that there is no STM32 with Wi-Fi.

That's the whole appeal to hobbyists, sure. But I'm guessing Espressif wants to be considered for more serious applications as well. Currently, there are good reasons to choose, say, an STM32 over an ESP32 for a commercial product if you don't need RF (or if RF is handled by another part of the product, such as a SoM running Linux). I'm guessing they wanna change that.

The ESP8684H2 is 1.20 qty 1, more than enough to handle BT an Wifi, then you can use any MCU you want as your application processor.

Seems likely they'll continue releasing more models, further integrating the features of the P4 and C6 for example. Maybe we'll even get some risc-v SIMD instructions and support for off-chip SRAM.

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