Does anyone know of a good comparison resource?

This is a little bit more interactive and detail-oriented. I think they also have flashy onesheet PDFs that are more marketing oriented.

I think moving from Make in the old version of IDF to CMake was a mistake.

And just like any build system for everything language/stack, there is a small group of hardcore "enthusiasts" who create and push their true build tech to rule them all and then there is the large majority of people who have to deal with it and just want to build the damn thing.

It also says 320 KB of ROM, which seems low. Judging from the product name (DevKitC-1-N8R4) and their other products, it has 8 MB of flash.

Maybe not applicable for this new one, but that's my understanding for the S3/C5 models. (something like 16mb NAND and 8mb PSRAM)

ESP32-S3 was, AIUI, their last non RISC-V chip.

It was announced in 2020 and released in 2022.

0. https://www.hackster.io/news/espressif-s-teo-swee-ann-confir...

>Espressif Systems (SSE: 688018.SH) announced ESP32-C5, the industry’s first RISC-V SoC that supports 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz dual-band Wi-Fi 6, along with Bluetooth 5 (LE) and IEEE 802.15.4 (Zigbee, Thread) connectivity. Today, we are glad to announce that ESP32-C5 is now in mass production.

Better compiler support for RISC-V, but everything I've seen from them is a much shorter pipeline than the older Xtensa cores, so flash cache misses hit it harder.

Both RISC-V and Xtensa suffer from the lack of an ALU carry bit for the purposes of improving pipelining. But for these small cores it means 64-bit integer math usually takes a few more cycles than a Cortex-M Arm chip

So... depends on the project.

My playing with C3 betrayed that you have to use much larger buffers for things like i2s to make it work without glitching.

Does it have CAN?

How does the core compare to their old ones?

I'm a little disappointed that it only has one core even though I haven't used the second one on the older chips yet.

Pinout for the dev board.

My impulse purchase has been tempered with "eh, do I really need it?"

If all you need is Zigbee/BLE and a few IO pins, an nRF52840 dongle is still $10 on DigiKey.

That alone puts US-based sellers at a mega disadvantage compared to cheap Chinese goods - and it's not a good thing.

These things are tiny and very cheap to ship. I could probably pack 40 of them into a USPS flat rate box shipped anywhere in the US for $9.30.

This was a decent argument when you could get things shipped from China for $0.50, but not now or in this case.

Why do I have this sickening feeling that in a few years anyone doing anything with hardware is going to be ordering everything direct from China?

One of the main reasons RISC-V is gaining popularity is that companies can implement their own cores (or buy cheaper IP cores than from ARM) and take advantage of existing optimizing compilers. Espressif are actually a perfect example; the core they used before (Xtensa) was esoteric and poorly supported and switching to RISC-V gives them better toolchain support right out of the gate.