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Comment by qwertox | Hacker News Reader

All these new models have been single core chips. I do I²S mp3 + FFT encoding on an ESP32 and stream that over UDP, but am only able to do so because they are dual core. It would be sad to see that Espressif abandons this.

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The recently released ESP32-S3 is a dual core, so it doesn't look like they are abandoning multi-core chips anytime soon.

> All these new models have been single core chips.

The new models have all been RISC-V-based. I wonder if the multi-core situation for RISC-V is somehow more difficult or more expensive, and Espressif is having trouble justifying doing it?

I suspect the RISC-V cores are quite a lot larger in silicon area. Remember that the ESP series needs to integrate analogue circuitry for the wifi stuff, so the silicon process isn't optimal for logic, which in turn makes silicon area even more valuable.

Espressif guy here: we're not.

AIUI S models are dual-core, C models are single-core.

And S models still use tensilica CPUs, but that will change over time.

> I²S mp3 + FFT encoding on an ESP32 and stream that over UDP

what does this mean, if you dont mind me asking?

You hook up a MEMS microphone and read the data (via I²S), encode it to mp3 and also to FFT data and stream the mp3 audio stream via UDP to a server, which can then be connected to via VLC player to play back that stream. The FFT data can also be streamed in a custom binary format, in order to have an real-time visual representation of the streamed mp3 audio.

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