BL602/BL604 RISC-V WiFi and Bluetooth 5.0 SoC will sell at ESP8266 price point

Re:BL602/BL604 RISC-V WiFi and Bluetooth 5.0 SoC will sell a... by xondono on Saturday October 24, 2020 @04:21AM (#24877748)

The trick is that ESP* chips implement a lot of the stack in firmware. This saves a lot of IP in dedicated hardware that allows for price reduction, but has it’s drawbacks, mostly in terms of energy consumption.

There’s also a good amount of problems involved in having a non-auditable (non certified) piece of firmware running in a coprocessor that handles communications, and being closed source and Chinese doesn’t help.

The difference is generally that the maker space doesn’t need to be production ready.

By the way, Murata has modules on the ~6$ range (depending on what features you want)

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Re:BL602/BL604 RISC-V WiFi and Bluetooth 5.0 SoC will sell a... by baybal2 on Saturday October 24, 2020 @06:19AM (#24878212)

Not only the radio is software, cores themselves, as I understand, are not hard macro, and I find it more surprising that such very generic synthesized chip is not an even bigger power hog.

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Re:BL602/BL604 RISC-V WiFi and Bluetooth 5.0 SoC will sell a... by monocasa on Saturday October 24, 2020 @03:47PM (#24881494)

Just throwing the entire design at the synthesizer these days seems to be pretty close to a collection of hand laid out hard macros. The synthesizer being a lot more aggressive about optimizing out signals that leave the macro (and downstream uses of those signals, so those global optimizations that are hard for a human to see) seems to make up for it's deficiencies with perfect local layout.

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Re:BL602/BL604 RISC-V WiFi and Bluetooth 5.0 SoC will sell a... by rowanG077 on Monday October 26, 2020 @05:24PM (#24901634)

Wait what? You are telling me the ESP's are actually FPGA's with a preconfigured core?

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