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A comment on BL602/BL604 RISC-V WiFi and Bluetooth 5.0 SoC will sell at ESP8266 price point. Parent comment

Re:BL602/BL604 RISC-V WiFi and Bluetooth 5.0 SoC will sell a... by pantalaimon on Saturday October 24, 2020 @07:07AM (#24878424)
> Also, we have horrendous price gouging for memory. A mere 128k to 256k bump in memory spec on a microcontroller will send you back a $1.20 in chip price.

To be fair, the esp* chips don't have memory mapped on-chip flash but load the code from external SPI flash to RAM at startup.

While that solution is cheaper (and also faster due to executing from RAM) it adds a small delay at startup powering the large RAM uses more energy.

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Re:BL602/BL604 RISC-V WiFi and Bluetooth 5.0 SoC will sell a... by sokoloff on Saturday October 24, 2020 @07:58AM (#24878636)
Esp8285 has 1MB integrated flash memory (2MB on one variant).

https://www.espressif.com/sites/default/files/documentation/...

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Re:BL602/BL604 RISC-V WiFi and Bluetooth 5.0 SoC will sell a... by pantalaimon on Saturday October 24, 2020 @09:01AM (#24878930)
it's build into the package, but it's still a separate die connected via SPI.
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Re:BL602/BL604 RISC-V WiFi and Bluetooth 5.0 SoC will sell a... by sokoloff on Saturday October 24, 2020 @09:10AM (#24878984)
Yes, from a power standpoint that matters. From a BOM cost and PCB layout standpoint, it doesn't.
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