ESP8266 Community Forum

Apart form cost how does ESP8266 stack up against Texas Instruments' CC3200?

CC3200 looks like it can handle larger apps, but I am not sure about that. It depends on how effective the ESP8266 ROM is. CC3200 has more useful peripherals like ADC. It is a Cortex-M4 which is a decent ARM CPU. ARM CPUs use the standard ARM compilers. You could run Linux on a Cortex-M4 if there was more RAM available. TI will have far better support and documentation when CC3200 is fully launched.

But... it is unlikely that these features are worth the five to one price difference if you are building in any kind of volume. Roughly - for less than four thousand production units the TI chip will win even though it costs $20,000 more. You will make up that $20K via the better support you will get from TI saving you $20K in development expenses. For higher volumes it is worth the pain of dealing with an unusual chip in order to capture the price advantage,

If you are just building a few hundred of something stick with the CC3000 module. It is totally painless to use.

BTW - to get factory pricing on ESP8266 you have to buy full reels of 5,000 chips.

I was thinking on the same lines, but might consider it for lower volumes too. The applications I have in mind do not require complex programming.

I anticipate that the maker community will be drawn to ESP8266 and support from the community will much better than what you could get from TI.

ARM processors are available for as low as 32 cents and 8 bit micros are even cheaper. So if power consumption or board space is not a concern then you can simply use ESP8266 as a peripheral. Even with the additional micro, the cost is still lower than CC3200 or any other WiFi soultion.

If TI revises the cost of CC3200 to around $3 then it might tip the scale in TI's favor. But it has to do it before ESP8266 or any other SoC gains critical mass.

spacejunkie wrote:
ARM processors are available for as low as 32 cents and 8 bit micros are even cheaper. So if power consumption or board space is not a concern then you can simply use ESP8266 as a peripheral. Even with the additional micro, the cost is still lower than CC3200 or any other WiFi soultion.
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$0.32 can you point out who these are? Always interested.

Richard.