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by auxym 1097 days ago
A lot of grey-beard type embedded programmers, who programmed in assembly through the 80s and 90s, really got attached to their architecture of choice, whether that is AVR or MSP430 or 8051. That crew tends to be very conservative with tech choices, for both good and bad reasons.

Some then learned to tolerate ARM Cortex M.

But Espressif, this weird new and unknown Chinese manufacturer, came out with their own arch and instruction set that no one else uses (xtensa). A lot of old timers were wary.

Their price to feature ratio is unbeatable though. That go them in the maker/hobby community fast, and lately I've heard of more and more companies using esp32 for actual professional products.
2 comments
packetlost 1097 days ago
Xtensa is licensed from Tensilica which is both an American company, but also used extensively in non-consumer facing industrial systems. It's not that nobody uses it, it's that you're likely not even close to the target market they're made for. Espressif is a fabless semiconductor company, they don't actually make their chips, they license a bunch of parts, design some developer boards, and write software around it. They're much closer to a software company than a hardware company.
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ranma42 1097 days ago
Athereos wireless cards (ath10k) have also used Xtensa. And the audio DSP in newer intel chipsets (e.g. Apollo Lake) is also Xtensa-based, but unfortunately quite locked down (signed firmware only). See https://thesofproject.github.io/latest/platforms/index.html Also ISTR that older Radeon graphics cards used Xtensa (e.g. in the Unified Video Decoder).
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kps 1097 days ago
There was a period centered around the late '90s where new architectures were a dime a dozen, as access to fabs opened up, and small companies with an idea hoped to become the next Intel.

Anyway, ESP32-C3 is RISC-V, and I suspect they won't do any more new Xtensa cores.

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packetlost 1097 days ago
They've explicitly stated it's all RISC-V from here on out.
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adolph 1097 days ago
Yes, the announcement of the ESP32-P4 certainly makes it look that way.

https://www.espressif.com/en/news/ESP32-P4

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