8051 is OLD, Espressif is far newer. I like the amount of support that ESP gets but would personally never use it because I told trust Chinese networking chips

8051 is OLD, Espressif is far newer. I like the amount of support that ESP gets but would personally never use it because I told trust Chinese networking chips. The 8051 makes absolutely no sense to anyone - except when you consider the extreme low cost. In the example of the SiLabs parts, they took the modern peripherals from their ARM chips and plopped them down to a 8051 core. Some times that will work great, but if you are doing any “real work” (preocessing) on chip just go with ARM. But, he, sometimes you need to toggle some LEDs and write something out over SPI.