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points by pjmlp 3 days ago | 0 comments

> 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.

[–] pjmlp 3 days ago

Exactly, thanks for sharing.

[–] sedatk 3 days ago

I dearly remember the keyboard's warm red Caps Lock light and my sessions of running Print Master and writing BASIC programs on it.

[–] anigbrowl 3 days ago

You can quite literally run Doom on it. This isn't new either; here's a video from 8 years ago demonstrating that, and the author mentions not being the first person to do this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y6PP_IBbOTY

Newer models like the ESP32-P4 are substantially more powerful, running dual cores and with all sorts of computational acceleration built in.

[–] MeteorMarc 3 days ago

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

[–] zimpenfish 3 days ago

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

[–] randerson 3 days ago

That insane new Dyson toothbrush definitely. It has on-device AI analyzing 28 fps video from its camera.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tF2piG0N5gg

[–] glouwbug 3 days ago

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

[–] pavlov 3 days ago

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.

[–] vardump 1 day ago

The average scalar (=integer) instructions per cycle is pretty comparable between Pentium III and Xtensa LX6, the original ESP32 CPU representing the worst case.

While P3 is superscalar, it could only execute about 0.9 instructions per cycle on average. Of course you can optimize for it and get better results in certain cases.

Most Xtensa scalar instructions take just 1 clock, branches 3 for taken, 1 for not taken. So 0.7-0.8 instructions per clock is a reasonable estimate. Assuming of course code is executing from SRAM.

Xtensa's FPU is slow, and it lacks divide and square root instructions. Clock for clock, P3 probably outperforms it by 3-4x. It also lacks 64-bit floats.

[–] pjmlp 3 days ago

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.