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

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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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

Love the videos keep it up

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

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.

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.

Great video Eric. I'd like to see for comparison some kind of ML project. How about speech recognition? You can probably do training using edge impulse models.

Interesting project 👍

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

Very informative, thank you!

Just doing some searching on the websites these days. Seems that there are many STM32 boards with color camera and parallel LCD I/F. The design should be better than H7+Vision shield by looking at the HW design and demo video. Any idea?

Creative video, thanks :)

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

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.

I don't know about the S3, but the cortex m7 has a great DSP engine!

Nice video! Where can I find the demo shown at the end? Would a Portenta also be able to register input from a touchscreen display over the USB C hub?

Nice video again. Can you use the keyboard or the mouse as input device for LVGL with H7?

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).

Can't you also overclock the esp32 if you disable wifi?

At that price I got a Raspi4 with 8GB, module... if don't want a whole OS aka bare metal, it's okay-ish, having os functionality on the H7 won't be great.

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.

If efficiency is not an issue isn't a pi zero a better alternative?

Do you mind directing me to what example you used for the Portenta H7 and LVGL V8 widget demo with the USB-C hub, I've tried the arduino example but it doesn't seem to work.

Driving bldc motors with simplefoc would be a good match!!

your accident is really unique

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!

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

What can you DO in practice with it? Any applications examples?

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...

Esos cálculos son para procesamiento, el esp32 no es un chip para procesamiento sino q es un microcontrolador, tiene módulos para encriptacion por hardware para acelerar la encriptacion de datos cuando envías estos por internet, pero igual, la comparación para procesamiento no tiene mucha relevancia para definir un microcontrolador ya que no es el campo de uso

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

I might try this test on a raspberry pi 3a+ running baremetal using circle framework. that thing costs about 30 bucks and I'm guessing it will draw circles around the portenta.

Hello do you know if i can miner unmeable with these asic

hello, I am interested in working with project that use ESP32-S3. It is for object recognition. I would like to ask if what model should I use like FOMO or Tensorflow lite or other?

I can't for the life of me get one of those screens to work with my S3, can you let me know what pins you used and how you got it working? I'm at wits end :(

Can you make power consumption comparisons?

I mean, it's an embedded project, so using the same code for two different architectures with different capabilities kinda defeats the purpose. But I guess if you're not looking into some very high optimization level the esp32 should be already fine

I'm still not convinced that the H7 is worth it, because a Raspberry Pi CM4 costs $25 and blows both of them out of the water. The only advantage the H7 could conceivably have is power usage, and if you're in an environment where you're driving an HDMI display, how much do you care when neither draws more than 10 watts?

Arduino will always be the Godfather, but i have no idea who's buying them these days. If not for their IDE, I'm not sure they would ever be mentioned anymore. They have squeezed everything the ATmega328 can give, a decade ago. It should have been Ard that came up with the RPi. Now we've got an MCU cost higher than a top of the line ARM SBC? That's INSANE MAN! You were the chosen one Arduino. Arduino is what happens when bean counters replace engineers in upper management.

the double precision FPU made it fast.

anybody knows what kind lcd type he is use

Instead of this H7 board you can buy couple of SBCs like orange/banana/mango Pi with much higher performance

I cannot agree more between manufacturers that do not understand de doer market segments and want to sell at insane prices for something that is adapted lol, but these are the days we are living in right? right? :(

one board with ESP-S3 with HDMI can be the cheap solution. is this board buyable? I like also the cheaper way.

What about pi zero 15$ SBC maybe it can Outperform h7 microcontroller

serial possível colocar 2 esp 32 pra rodar em paralelo junto pra ver se ele se aproxima do m7 ?

There are much more cost effective M7+M4 boards out there. For example, you can get an official ST board with an M7 and M4 core: NUCLEO-H755ZI board from Mouser or Digikey for $29. Same performance as the Portenta. The H7 is a top end MCP for high performance applications. I used one to build a signal generator for developing a high performance DAQ to be used in research (physics laser lab). To switch LEDs or simple sensor readings I would not use an H7 as it is overkill. For that an ESP32-C3 or a RPi Pico is enough. Even the S3 is overkill.

Might be n near future H7 can power 3d printers as currently most of them are on Arduino mega and users can benefit faster computational speed and better options as mega sucks at many places in them... A new project for Marlin developers 🙂🙃

it would be awesome a dog fight between H7 vs Teensy 4.x

esp32s3 run like a turtle waiting for esp64

you shall make the code using esp-idf

Серьезно? Сравнивать устройства отличающиеся по цене в 10 раз? Почему бы в следующий раз не сравнить Amtel Tiny13 и Intel i7-12700k ?

Design engineering is everything in future. Who needs old. Imagine the first USB and Bluetooth. You can't get out of house.

At that pricepoint why not just go with a raspberry pi or something? Sure it's a bit bigger and stuff, but it's definitely more capable...

An interesting compare would be between the H7 and a Raspberry Pi 4 which have a comparable price and has hdmi output

Bought an h7 from microcenter for $62 with tax. seemed like a good deal.

High Performance Marvel Cinematic Universe? KEKW

Esp32 is best bro, esp32 is legend

Honestly? Hardcore PI and computational time is 0

Portenta vs teensy

I think so this comparision is pointless as reason is that stm32h7 have way more functionality and uses than esp32 can be used. and if you look at stm32h7 other boards one can get them around 30dollars. And I think using stmh7 with arduino environment is blasphemy XD

Yeah! But esp can access internet and host webserver. 😂🤣 No need extend Plugins.

Why do all the benchmarks deal with floating point math? It's been really well know for many decades now that hardware floating point chips will vastly outperform non-hardware floating point chips, which appears to be the case here. The real question is, how much does floating point math actually factor into embedded development projects and what percentage of embedded projects are being hindered by overall performance issues. To me, these are wildly different setups that don't even really compare. ESP32 typically is overkill for the vast majority of projects it's used in. It's basically an ultra cheap kitchen sink type of chip that create a vast field of freedom for creatives to utilize in projects. Obviously the H7 is superior in many aspects, but your video doesn't really provide the answers I would find important. What are their power consumption profiles compared to each other. How pointless is the H7's performance advantage with respects to various embedded projects being made today? If ESP32 is overkill already for most projects, how many projects is the H7 overkill for? In what specific use cases does a jump from the ESP32 become necessary? You showed it's HDMI output, which was interesting, but what about other advantages people may be interested in? How about AI? Voice recognition and optical recognitions, along with other video processing is something a lot of dev's are likely to be interested in for embedded projects going forward. Can either handle such tasks and how well. Does the H7 specifically outperform in that area? What are the specific real world project types that the H7 is actually better to use for than the ESP32?

H7 is too expensive and does not worth the $! The Teensy 4 has same M7 core. It can be run at 816Mhz without heatsink or 1Ghz with little fansink. It outperforms the H7! For 64-bit calculation, the dual core RISC-V 64-bit K210 can be run at 600Mhz. It's very fast as well. Further, it has NPU and APU. For Pi calculation, the Pi Zero W or Zero 2 W are much much faster then H7 and cost less! Sure, the Pi Zero 2 W has HDMI out, too. There are DMA optimized display libraries for ILI9341 on Teensy 3 and Teensy 4. The display result of Teensy 4 is a little bit slower than ESP32. But, the 80Mhz SPI display on ESP32 S3 is slower than ESP32 as well.

This comparison is Kind of unfair. The nucleo h7 Boards are way cheaper. And if you just compare the Chips price it's getting better for the h7. If you need WiFi Than the Esp32 maybe an Option. But if you take a Look at the tooling and toolchains aswell than Esp32 sucks. Esp-idf sucks hard. With every update new problems & bugs. If i would have to use Esp32 professionally i would quit my Job

I disagree with your PI test the ESP32 doesn’t support doubles it is running with software emulation VS the native FPU of the Cortex7, but in the primes test boths processors use 32bit integers then the difference is not 2x is less, it means that ESP32 is faster because it runs at 1/2x of the speed . The thing is that we have to choose as you said, witch Microcontroller is better with the problem we have to solve. With more than us$100 is better to use a raspberry py 4 and ans rbp pico together it will be cheapest than the H7

S3 is a piece of shit. You get what you pay for. Half the pins cannot be used. A/D on S3 is useless.

What a stupid comparison! The result is, that the faster processor is faster - what a surprise.