It's crazy what $5 can buy you in a microcontroller these days. Have a look at these Milk-V boards:
The duo has up to 256MB of memory, and a 1TOPS@INT8 TPU. They run Linux and are $5. I bought 5!
The duo has up to 256MB of memory, and a 1TOPS@INT8 TPU. They run Linux and are $5. I bought 5!
When I bought my 64 MB Duo they were $3!
Then for a long time they were $5 for the 64 MB, $7 for the 256 MB, and $10 for the 512 MB.
Sadly, like everything else, they've gone up considerably this year.
Note that the application-processor 1 GHz C906 and Arm A53 are either/or, you can't run both at the same time — similar to the Arm M33 and RISC-V Hazard3 core pairs on the Raspberry Pi RP2350.
And I hope it stays that way, I don't want MCU shortages...
I'll give a specific example apropos of TFA. Computer vision models were never run on MCUs because they were constrained to the point of being useless for this task, but then someone tried the impractical, and now it's trivial[1]
Regarding MCU shortages, you should be worried about the supply chain, but I don't see the impact really being from running LLMs on ESP-32s, of all things.
I think most of my embedded projects aren't that useful, but they've taught me a lot.
In my book, impractical means "I built a cuckoo wristwatch". Beyond impractical: "I built a cuckoo wristwatch but there was no room for a working mechanism".
I enter most of my learning project from the assumption that I could just buy/install whatever I am building and save time/money.
Please consider seeing things from a different perspective than "your book".
Not saying this to antagonise you, but because a lot of time reading comments like this makes other posters less willing to share their impractical efforts, and would love to read more of those, not less.
You're just extremely biased in what you consider to be a useful ML model. For example, for some strange reason you think only LLMs exist. The model must be as big as possible or else it is pointless.
Training custom non-LLM models for specific tasks so they run on a resource constrained device? You must be insane.
It's almost never worth it to buy the cheapest chip unless you're making a million of something, but there are very good ones around $1-$2, and $5 is the upscale stuff.
Used in the cheapest devices you wouldn't even imagine to contain any software - eg. To control a touch sensitive on-off switch.
Iirc an important caveat was that it was a one-time programmable (OTP) part. So you buy a bunch of them, programming failure or firmware-under-test doesn't work? -> toss the part. Of course that isn't an issue for a $0.03 part. But it can be an issue in terms of a board you want it on. Either that means discarding (breakout) boards too, or for development you'd need some kind of adapter to put bare ICs in.
Such annoyances only make sense for high-volume, low cost applications. Which is eactly where parts like that go in.
it's fun reading all the reactions to it (like "it’s cheaper to program a Padauk PMS150C to be a logic-level converter than to just buy a logic level converter"), but the magic is gone more-or-less
but some ideas inside it and padauk's ecosystem as a whole seem impressive https://jaycarlson.net/2019/09/06/whats-up-with-these-3-cent...
edit: PMS152 seems to still be 0.03$ !
What are you going to do with 120 of them?
Heck, that one would have no issue running Xerox PARC OSes.
Naturally there are still use cases were a PIC with 4KB would be the best option, but lets not behave as if there isn't anything better in most cases.
The arm experiment ran its course though; the power one vendor had in the marketplace started to be abused for the benefit of the IP holder and detriment to others. Now RISC-V is going one step further with a completely open ISA and also completely open designs. This is an excellent development in the nick of time.
I wonder how Apple feels about arm64 and RISC-V now. They could have probably bought ARM at any point but maybe never considered it to avoid anti-monopoly blowback.
Also you can reach out to ESP32 as alternative, plenty of maker projects using them.