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Espressif's ESP32-C5 Is Now in Mass Production
- snvzz 1y agoThis microcontroller, like all microcontrollers Espressif released in the last few years, uses RISC-V as the ISA.
- platevoltage 1y agoI believe the C series is RISC-V, not the S series.
- colechristensen 1y agoFrom the link >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.
- hughc 1y agoThis wording is ambiguous- it's the first to support 5GHz, but it's not their first RISC-V core.
- bobmcnamara 1y agoXtensa is a dead end, they said so on ESP32.com when someone pointed out the FPU ABI bottleneck
- platevoltage 1y agoI'm sure you're right. The current s3 chip is based on Xtensa, but it was released in 2020, so I guess the OP's statement is correct.
- bobmcnamara 1y agoEdit: dead end for espressif. Still gonna be in a bunch of DSPs and stuff
- snvzz 1y agoEspressif made a decisive shift to RISC-V[0], effectively abandoning Tensilica. 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-confirms-a-shift-to-risc-v-by-default-unless-we-have-some-special-needs-5e365d49bcc5 https://www.hackster.io/news/espressif-s-teo-swee-ann-confir...
- osrec 1y agoGenuine question: is that a good or bad thing?
- connicpu 1y agoIt's a big plus if you want to write code for it in something like Rust. LLVM support for the architecture they used on their older chips (xtensa) for a very long time required compiling a fork of LLVM and rustc in order to target the chips. It may still, I didn't keep up with the effort to upstream that target. RISC-V is an open architecture that has a lot of people excited so compiler support for it is very good. Though as far as why Espressif is using it, it feels likely they would use it because it means they don't have to pay anyone any royalties for the ISA.
- baby_souffle 1y agoUnless you're a shareholder of arm, hard to see how it's a bad thing.
- bobmcnamara 1y agoThe other core they've used is Xtensa
- bobmcnamara 1y agoIt's a mix. 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
- viraptor 1y agoBut that also depends on what you use it for. If you're after the wifi and IO and other nice things for a mostly idle device - the pipeline is almost irrelevant. Esphome can run on older versions just fine too. On the other hand if you're doing something very optimised and need tight timing around interrupts to drive external hardware - it may matter a lot. So... depends on the project.
- stavros 1y agoThis is looking pretty great, I've really wanted a MCU with Zigbee on it, for the various little battery-operated devices I've wanted to make. However, with Espressif's lineup, I've really lost track of what does what, lately. Does anyone know of a good comparison resource?
- baby_souffle 1y agohttps://products.espressif.com/#/product-comparison https://products.espressif.com/#/product-comparison This is a little bit more interactive and detail-oriented. I think they also have flashy onesheet PDFs that are more marketing oriented.
- dx4100 1y agoThe ESP32-C6 has a Zigbee radio. I have 6 myself -- they're great.
- stavros 1y agoI bought a few of those, but at $8 they're a bit pricier than the $3 Espressif spoiled me with.
- nagisa 1y agosupermini boards with esp32c6 on it can be had for approximately 4 euro each.
- stavros 1y agoDo you have any links? I couldn't find any.
- dvdkon 1y agoDigikey has the modules for under 4 EUR in unit quantities, but they aren't the friendliest to integrate, since they only have pads on the bottom. I also found some boards with the bare chip for just over 4 EUR there, you can also find similar ones on AliExpress.
- bri3d 1y agoAnnounced 2+ years ago (almost 3, now that I look: https://www.espressif.com/en/news/ESP32-C5 https://www.espressif.com/en/news/ESP32-C5 ) and sampling 1+ year ago, good to see it finally come. 5GHz support is increasingly important.
- mort96 1y agoWhy is 5GHz increasingly important? For most IoT applications, isn't the better wall penetration of 2.4GHz more important than the increased peak speeds of 5GHz?
- zamadatix 1y agoSome places are wanting to go dual 5 GHz radios on APs (for general client density) rather than 2.4 GHz and 5GHz radios but 2.4 GHz only IoT devices force you into keeping a 2.4 GHz radio infrastructure active. These kinds of environments tend to turn the power down on 2.4 GHz anyways as "goes through walls" can actually be a bad thing for coverage when multiple APs are at play (SNR is more important than raw power). For a typical consumer home use case continuing to use 2.4 GHz is most likely ideal though. Though some apartment complexes have such bad 2.4 GHz interference even that might not be universal.
- wrigby 1y agoYes and no, depending on the environment. In an apartment building, the wall penetration is a liability, as the 2.4ghz spectrum, with only three channels, gets extremely congested. Going 5ghz helps immensely, with more channels available and less penetration, so you get more spectrum reuse.
- mystified5016 1y agoPop open a WiFi scanner sometime. Unless you're living way out in the country, the 2.4GHz spectrum will be pretty much full. Everyone has a 2.4GHz router and you're likely to get a lot of interference. Really it's the same reason computers moved to 5GHz, and now 6GHz.
- bityard 1y ago
- kovac 1y agoIf anyone from Espressif seeing this, I love your MCUs. But can you please improve the ESP-IDF so that it's usable on BSD systems. The Linuxisms baked into its build system is unnecessary. I think moving from Make in the old version of IDF to CMake was a mistake.
- sho_hn 1y agoIt should generally be easier to make a CMake buildsystem work well on the BSDs than hand-cobbled Makefiles, in terms of opportunities to introduce Linuxisms.
- kovac 1y agoI wasn't really clear there. The Linux-specific stuff wasn't caused by Cmake. They are two independent things that happened as part of the same upgrade. Considering that they are supporting Linux, there was no real reason to make it so Linux-specific that all other Unix-like systems got excluded.
- PedroBatista 1y agoLove it or hate it, CMake is more or less the de facto build system for C/C++ 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.
- actinium226 1y agoHate it, definitely hate it. I mean, I use it, but I'm not very happy about it.
- kovac 1y agoI didn't mean to sound like a hard-core BSD enthusiast, sorry. I was just very frustrated when they moved to cmake in their newer IDF, they added useless things that excluded BSDs. In its current state, it's untenable to patch it to make it work. This wasn't caused by the use of cmake. They could've moved to cmake, but done so with other OSes in mind, esp since they're already in our neighbourhood.
- colechristensen 1y agoThey link to a $15 developer board on Aliexpress (much the same as the rest of the ESP developer boards floating around for years) which is now inflated to $35 with tax, shipping, and tariff. My impulse purchase has been tempered with "eh, do I really need it?"
- turnsout 1y agoThis should help all the US-based RISC-V microcontroller companies though, right? /s
- orthecreedence 1y agoFinally all the mom and pop chip fabs running out of a garage get a fighting chance.
- dx4100 1y agoCan't wait to buy from some west coast hipster with a garage fab now that it's economically viable. /s
- colechristensen 1y agoBut wouldn't it be cool if that were a thing? Miniaturized fab tech that some extreme tech hipster could produce bespoke chips out of the garage? I wonder if you gave the right people a billion dollars what the best garage sized fab they could develop could do.
- Alupis 1y agoThe really criminal thing is it only costs $8.43 to mail that thing from China to your house in the USA... it likely would cost you more to mail that same item to yourself from yourself. That alone puts US-based sellers at a mega disadvantage compared to cheap Chinese goods - and it's not a good thing.
- 1y ago
- platevoltage 1y agoLet's hope they will finally enable the USB Host HID Class Driver to support non-boot protocol devices this go around.
- shoelessone 1y agoAny chance you could explain this to somebody who is just learning about HID and has run this example: https://github.com/espressif/esp-idf/tree/master/examples/peripherals/usb/device/tusb_hid https://github.com/espressif/esp-idf/tree/master/examples/pe... ? "non-boot protocol" I'm guessing is the key here? I don't have a super deep understanding of HID or what the "boot-protocol" refers to.
- thequux 1y agoThe USB HID protocol is designed to support basically any device that regularly reports a set of values; those values can represent which keys are pressed, how a mouse has moved, how a joystick is positioned, etc. Now, different devices have different things that they support: joysticks have varying numbers of axes, mice have different sets of buttons, some keyboards have dials on them, etc. So, there's no single format for a report that simultaneously efficiently uses bandwidth and supports all the things a human interface device might do. To solve this, the HID protocol specifies that the host can request a "report descriptor" that specifies the format and meaning of the status reports. This is great for complex devices running a full OS; there's plenty of memory and processing power to handle those varying formats. However, these HID devices needed to also work in very limited environments: a real mode BIOS, microcontroller, etc. So, for certain classes of device such as keyboards and mice, there is a standard but limited report format called the "boot protocol". IIRC, the keyboard version has space to list 6 keys that are pressed simultaneously (plus modifiers), all of which must be from the same table of keys in the spec, and the mouse has an dX and dY field plus a bitfield for up to 8 buttons (four of which are the various ways you can scroll). To implement a more complex device, you'd want to be able to specify your own report format, which the ESP driver doesn't seem to allow you to do.
- philsnow 1y ago
- winkywooster 1y agohow much memory does the dev kit have? it’s not clear after following links off that article.
- mzakharo1 1y agoonboard memory is limited. PSRAM is available
- freeqaz 1y agoIf it's like the other ESP32s with PSRAM support then 2-8MB most likely. IIRC it is addressed in the same way as the NAND, so the more RAM the less NAND you can have. Maybe not applicable for this new one, but that's my understanding for the S3/C5 models. (something like 16mb NAND and 8mb PSRAM)
- self 1y agoThis image says 384 KB of RAM: https://docs.espressif.com/projects/esp-dev-kits/en/latest/esp32c5/_images/esp32-c5-devkitc-1-pin-layout.png https://docs.espressif.com/projects/esp-dev-kits/en/latest/e... 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.
- dezgeg 1y agoMaybe 320KB is the size of the bootrom? Although I don't see why that would be worth mentioning.
- shoelessone 1y agoAny guesses as to when a hobbyist might be able to buy the module without the dev board? Their aliexpress store didn't have them as far as I can tell, I assume they are prioritizing dev boards for the moment unless you're a big enough company to actually talk directly with Espressif.
- self 1y agoIt's on their store at https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005008790788462.html https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005008790788462.html
- teraflop 1y agoThat's a dev board.
- shoelessone 1y agoThanks for the link, but yeah as the other poster mentioned, this is for a dev board. I'd be interested in buying the module (which is somewhere between the bare IC and the dev board). Here is an example from their store of an ESP32-S3 module: https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005006334720108.html?pdp_npi=4%40dis%21JPY%21%EF%BF%A5%201%2C004%21%EF%BF%A5%201%2C004%21%21%216.88%216.88%21%402102f0c917460775848853726ee7d4%2112000044482048154%21sh%21JP%21740014285%21X&spm=a2g0o.store_pc_allItems_or_groupList.new_all_items_2007540227396.1005006334720108 https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005006334720108.html?pdp_np...
- Taniwha 1y agoThey don't have datasheets up for the modules yet sadly Can anyone answer my question will the C5-WROOM be a pin for pin dropin replacement for a C6?
- amelius 1y agoDigikey?
- teraflop 1y agoThe only listing they currently have is for the dev board, and it's not stocked yet.
- phkahler 1y agoDoes it have floating point hardware? 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.
- all2 1y agohttps://docs.espressif.com/projects/esp-dev-kits/en/latest/esp32c5/_images/esp32-c5-devkitc-1-pin-layout.png https://docs.espressif.com/projects/esp-dev-kits/en/latest/e... Pinout for the dev board.
- popol12 1y agoYeah, I too wonder when they will release their first multi-core RISC chip. I guess it's not that easy.
- yonatan8070 1y agoI was able to find a preliminary datasheet on Google, it looks like it has 2x CAN (called TWAI in the datasheet). I can't find info on whether it has an FPU or not https://www.erlendervik.no/ESP32-C5%20Beta_ESP32-P4_ESP8686_ESP32-C3FH4X/ESP32_C5_Chip_Datasheet_V0.1_PRELIMINARY_EN.pdf https://www.erlendervik.no/ESP32-C5%20Beta_ESP32-P4_ESP8686_...
- brokenmachine 1y agoAt least on Arduino, the second core is used for wifi. So you can't really use it yourself unless you don't want the wifi to be reliable.
- janis1234 1y agofrom my understanding RISC-V chips are slower and more expensive and less optimized compilers, so why in the world would an end user use one?
- bri3d 1y agoNo? Performance is implementation specific, they’re usually cheaper than ARM since there’s no core ISA license overhead, and while the core instruction set being extremely limited does cause a little bit of tension in compiler land, most cores with a baseline set of extensions get reasonable code generation these days. 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.
- RicoElectrico 1y agoBut where do the original Xtensa cores place then?
- boznz 1y agoYou are really only correct in your last point as the advantage of RISC-V is to the company implementing their own core, not to the end user. The reason is that CPU cores only form a tiny part of the SOC, the rest of the SOC is proprietary and likely to be documented to whatever level the company needs and the rest if available hidden under layers of NDA's. Just because the ISA is open source does not mean you know anything about the rest of the chip. saying that, the C5 is a nice SOC, and it is nice that we have some competition to ARM.
- Scene_Cast2 1y agoI wonder if the power consumption is any better. An nRF runs circles around any existing ESP32 variants in terms of power.
- KennyBlanken 1y agoNot to mention the horrific peak power draw. It took people a while to figure out that the things need a fair bit of close-by capacitance on the power rail or they crash.
- stavros 1y agoHow much capacitance? I built my own sensors based on ESP8266 and they've been flaky, and I wonder whether that's the issue.
- wwarren 1y agoComing out of deep sleep and Wifi coming back up, I’ve seen upwards of 600mA
- stavros 1y agoWow, jeez, no wonder the USB won't power it...
- xobs 1y agoThat's 600 mA at 3.3V. USB should be fine, but of course you need the capacitance to deal with that. Radio PAs can be power-hungry beasts.
- obitsten 1y agoThe annoying thing is this is only due to "calibration" which can, with some highly esoteric optimisations, be skipped. Depending on the application , this can realise massive gains in peak power, wakeup latency, and even average power. The whole process is hidden in a binary blob though and espressif will not elaborate on it, so it's very challenging to alter.
- mindslight 1y ago$126/ea in quantity after tariffs. 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, like we're some kind of undeveloped client state?
- HeyLaughingBoy 1y agoWe already are!
- Johanx64 1y agoYou are already living in this reality. And it has already been happening for quite a few years by now. People that are especially vocal and badly hit by tarrifs at the moment, are the people who have already been doing just that. This transition happened so quickly that most people haven't fully cought up to the implications to the full extent. In my mind, China is already the center of gravity.
- mindslight 1y agoWe've still got local US distributors though, regardless of everything being made in China. Like if you decide you need something tomorrow, you can go on Amazon and get most things pretty quick (despite overpaying 1.5-2x compared to Aliexpress). And there's a whole cottage industry of 3d printing shops selling canned solutions to people who don't want to hunt Aliexpress themselves. It's been well over a decade since I was doing embedded design professionally, so my perspective is coming more from a hobby/3d printing/"maker" place. But it feels like one of the main results of these tariffs is that the bottom is going to drop out on Chinese and Chinese-adjacent sellers preloading so much stuff into US warehouses ahead of sale, and instead just shipping orders direct from China. Using a US warehouse means the seller has to front the money for the tariffs as well and takes a risk of them being lowered depending on Krasnov's whims. Whereas shipping direct from China, even if the seller is handling the tariffs (eg Aliexpress Choice), they've already got the cash in hand from a confirmed purchase.
- 15155 1y agoWhich tariffs? Microcontrollers are exempt from recent reciprocal tariffs.
- londons_explore 1y agoIs the 10k unit price public?
- rkangel 1y agoThis is the real missing information. I don't know how much to care (in my professional capacity) without some pricing indication.
- londons_explore 1y agoProfessionally I use the esp8266 a bunch because it's still cheapest - but the lack of 5Ghz is really starting to bite as customers complain it 'doesnt work'
- antoniuschan99 1y agoHopefully p4 will be released soon too!
- asadm 1y agodid they ever announce the price of p4?
- forsalebypwner 1y agoI just ordered a P4 dev kit from Amazon yesterday, ETA is Wednesday! https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0F63FQB8D?ref=ppx_yo2ov_dt_b_fed_asin_title https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0F63FQB8D?ref=ppx_yo2ov_dt_b_fed_...
- winrid 1y agoWould an esp32 be the best soc for LoRa? I don't need WiFi or BT, which I know I can turn off to save power. Contemplating trying STM32 instead, don't have experience programming it yet.
- obitsten 1y agoNo. All you would need is a SPI interface or whatever the Lora module speaks. The most basic microcontroller can do that. Any ESP32 is overkill for this.
- winrid 1y agoRight. Sorry I meant development boards. This is low volume, probably will only make a few a year. The nice thing about the esp32 is I can get the board with lora/display built in, with a battery, for $25 each. The stm32 board and module is only a tiny bit less, for example. If I wanted to I could do this with a cheap 8bit microcontroller, I would just have to design a custom board with an oscillator to modulate the IR LEDs etc. I was gonna do that with PWM from the microcontroller to "simplify" things. Edit: oh the MSP430 is neat! If I cared about battery life (driving 200ma of LEDs anyway...) I'd totally use that.
- winrid 1y agoThe XIAO RP2040 looks perfect for what I'm doing, actually, and draws less power.
- 15155 1y agohttps://www.seeedstudio.com/LoRa-E5-Wireless-Module-Tape-Reel-p-5302.html https://www.seeedstudio.com/LoRa-E5-Wireless-Module-Tape-Ree... Use something based on the STM32WLE5JC or a discrete SX1262.
- winrid 1y agoIf I needed to build a bunch I'd definitely go that route - that's a great deal!
- 1y ago
- purpleidea 1y agoThe big anti-feature is that developers can block users from flashing the chips. Yes, there's a security angle, but if I have the chip in my hands, I should be able to flip some pin to reprogram the chip and prevent all the e-waste.
- KeplerBoy 1y agoYes, it's one thing to prevent others from reading the flash, but I don't see the value in preventing reflashing it.
- overfeed 1y agoIt counters evil maid attacks.
- echoangle 1y agoNot really, if the evil maid is sophisticated enough to bring their own firmware to reflash your devices, they could also just swap the PCB containing the controller or solder in a new chip
- overfeed 1y agoI chose the word counters rather than eliminate for the reason you outlined. If you're the vendor, you can add a tamper-resistant or tamper-evident design to raise the cost of ,component-replacement attacks. Which can be countered by whole-device replacement, which in turn is countered by device identity attestation, amd so on, in an endless arms-race.
- franga2000 1y agoTamper-evident stuff and device attestation solve all these problems even without preventing reflashing. If you can't check if the device has been tampered with or replaced, preventing flashing won't help. If you can, you don't need to.
- Tepix 1y agoBought a bunch of ESP32-C3 Supermini boards for 1.05€ each. Incredible value.
- unit149 1y ago[dead]
- gitroom 1y agoHonestly, shipping stuff direct from China and paying more for it here always trips me out, but it's kinda the norm now. You think it'll get easier to actually repair or reprogram stuff or are we just stuck tossing hardware once it's locked down?
- TechDebtDevin 1y agoToo bad after tariffs, this little guy would have cost $10-15 and now will probably be $50 + I feel like the Trump admin is going to have to make a carve out for the esp32 or certain Espressif products. So many IOT businesses going to go out of business if these MCs baloon in price.
- 15155 1y agoThese are exempt from recent tariffs (HTS 8542).
- TechDebtDevin 1y agoAlright, I figured that would have to be the case. Do you know any resources that break down what is exempt and what is not, without having to look up the individual HTS codes?
- 15155 1y agohttps://content.govdelivery.com/accounts/USDHSCBP/bulletins/3db9e55 https://content.govdelivery.com/accounts/USDHSCBP/bulletins/...
- botanical 1y agoI wanted a board with Zigbee support but $21 ($16 plus $5 shipping) is quite expensive for a single board.
- varispeed 1y agoI wish there was something more powerful than STM32H7 or RT1070 available. It would be awesome to be able to compute complex algorithms in real time.