Who Needs High-Performance MCU? (Arduino Portenta H7 vs Espressif ESP32-S3)

*Correction*
ESP32-S3 has 1 × DVP 8-bit ~16-bit camera interface.

Both the Arduino Portenta H7 and Espressif ESP32-S3 are dual-core operating MCUs. The price difference between the two devices is huge. I'm going to see if it's worth it through this video. Also, you can find the source code used here on my Github repository. I hope this will help you with your project.

*Timestamps
0:00 - Intro: ESP32-S3 vs Portenta H7
0:33 - Spec Comparison (Simply)
1:10 - Core: ESP32-S3 vs Portenta H7
1:34 - Test #1: Calculating Pi w/ Single Core
2:30 - Test #2: Finding Prime Numbers w/ Single Core
3:43 - H7 Dual Core
4:04 - S3 Dual Core
4:11 - Test #3: Execute two tasks at the same time
5:19 - Core Speed Test Result
5:57 - Outro: H7 Connect External Monitor

[ESP32-S3-DevKitC-1-N8R8 Development Board]

[Who Cares About MCU with Camera?]

[Raspberry Pi Pico VS ESP32 S2 speed comparison benchmark using CircuitPython]

[ELECROW Raspberry Pi Monitor 7 Inch Touchscreen IPS 1024x600]

[Project GitHub]

#Comparison #Portenta #Espressif #ESP32S3 #STM32H747 #ThatProject

[marc-andreservant]

Chinese microcontrollers can be insanely cheap. With Espressif, you get a 240MHz dual-core processor with floating point, DSP library, a camera port, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, wireless firmware updates and built-in USB JTAG debugger. All for $3.

[GIGEO]

ESP32 is perfect for my needs. It is really fast, dirt cheap and professionally built with the official SDK / FreeRTOS / Additional multicore capabilities.
A well thought out piece of hardware/solution imo.

[lmamakos]

One obvious difference here is that the Cortex M7 part likely has hardware floating point support in its instruction set, while the ESP32 CPU is doing floats with a software emulation. I'm sure that's the primary factor for the huge different in performance for the computation of PI, if the code is using "float" variables.

[RafaGmod]

The thing with the ESP32 is that is so overpowered for it's price. For the price of a nano you get 2x32bit core, wifi, bluetooth, a very good low power mode and very good peripherals.
If you need something different you have to pay a little more, because manufacturers put a lot of peripherals in microcontrolles so it can me very usefull for a lot of scenarios and become scaleable (one chip does a lot of things).
The ESP is mainly made for IoT and HMI, and only for it it's umbeatale. If you need computing power, ARM/raspberry is the way to go

[ugetridofit]

Thanks for the video. I must admit when I first saw the price for the Portenta H7, I laughed saying they are nuts thinking people will want it for that price.

[thebaconbreadful]

I haven't tuned in for a while and must say you've come a long way! Nice video.

[TradieTrev]

I could see the H7 being useful for digital signage, cheers for the testing that you do.

[korgmangeek]

In embedded you also care about efficiency, interrupts and low power in deep sleep.

It’s not a desktop computer to play games. So, you often don’t care about “speed” but about other stuff.

[SilvioMaranoSMH]

ESP32 performs a lot better using ESP32-IDF, also the S3 version includes new vector operations to improve performances. If these aspects aren't taken in account, just compiling the sketch in ArduinoIDE doesn't give fair terms of comparison.

[todortodorov]

If you want to calculate pi or find primes, both suck compare to an AMD Ryzen Threadripper or AMD EPYC.

However, the primary use of the ESP32 is IoT devices. Those do not calculate pi or look for primes. They check sensors, work with I/O and communicate with cloud services. The calculations they do are often primitive, like moving averages or other simple statistics. Where the ESP32 excels is the number of I/O and built-in interfaces to make it easy to create IoT devices, as well as low power consumption. And the price!

[InspiredScience]

I'm probably overlooking something -- but I don't see a need for a $99 MCU. If I needed a $99 MCU, I'd benefit more from a full blown SBC (Raspberry Pi, etc).

[remy-]

The update of the screen also takes a lot of processor resources. Maybe there is a lot of gain to get if this is used less times, without any noticeable loss of screen-esthetics.

[laynemccormic]

Great video and I love your accent. The way you said finished had me grinning

[mastrbug]

I just remade the calculation with float instead of double to use the FPU of the ESP32, and if took about 9 seconds for the same result. I don't have the H7 to make the same test, will have it soon. So when comparing thins, please use the same hardware capability at each side because it's not representative of the rest of the workload capability.

[mastrbug]

The ESP32 have 32 bits hardware math (float) but software 64 bit math (double) I think this can explain the big speed difference. I'm not even sure if the 32 bit Hardware is used for the 64 bit precision double...

[Trident]

I like the ESP32, I would like to see the S3 variant, run NN tasks. For more compute, ARM cortex seems like an alternative.

[peterschets]

The ESP32-C3 has neural network (AI) support. Are you sure that these tests use NN support?

[xamashee]

With that price I'd prefer a SBC. This price is a rest in peace concept of microcontroller.

[GMarksman]

Your comparison table at the beginning says the ESP32-S3 has no camera interface. It actually does - DVP 8 - 16 bit up to 40MHz

[LimbaZero]

Also H7 have more available IO:s and peripherals. It has 2x 80 pin connectors.
Other costly Arduino is MKR 4000 Vidor. It has small FPGA (16k logic elements and 56 18x18 multipliers) but they butchered connectivity that you can't map fast LVDS signal to board edge connector. It's limited to 3.3V IO pins that is capable to 100 MHz switching. Basically you can use FPGA to accelerate some algorithms but it need special skills and transferring data between main mcu and fpga take time.