ESP8266 Community Forum

There is a new article on HaD promoting Mediatek's new MT7681 chip, which is supposed to be a threat for our ESP8266

Not quite IMHO...

Pros:

• manufactured by a big player (Mediatek/Ralink)

Cons:

• manufactured by a big player (Mediatek/Ralink)
• twice as expensive in same QTY (~ 10 USD vs. 5USD in single QTY)
• larger BOM: ESP only requries crystal + caps and Flash chip
• RF calibration required: guess what you will get from cheap suppliers
• same size (5 x 5 mm), but QFN40 with 0.4 mm pitch vs. QFN32 with 0.5 mm pitch

And unlike what is said in the article, no free SDK or Gnu compiler in sight!

Thanks for posting this - I wanted to do it, but couldn't find time. And indeed, community can't afford to have dedicated sites for each chip.

I share your sentiment regarding "big player" and crutches required for a chip - look at MT7681 module - it's full of breadcrumbs of passive components. It seems that only little guys like Espressif do their homework and put everything, up to RF stuff like baloon, into a chip. Big guys threw out yet another little monster. So, my sympathy is definitely with Espessif, if they will be friendly and open, I hope they'll have a chance to stand in IoT niche.

One interesting thing in MT7681 is its internal CPU architecture. I never saw Xtensa in the wild, but at least I heard about it. But MT7681 is based on completely new stealth arch called "Andes". Gotta love CPU zoo we're having here (throw in GPS with embedded SPARC for more fun: http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/com ... _10hz_gps/).

Andes arch appear to be MIPS hack-alike. Specifically, guys wanted to use proven arch, but didn't want to license it, so made theirs instruction set. As in MIPS, there're 32 regs, etc. However, with further evolution of instruction set, they went away from RISC purity towards real-world practicality - e.g., there're short instructions which implicitly address stack pointer, etc.

Contrary to contraries, there's Open Source support for Andes CPUs: http://osdk.andestech.com/ . Actually, GCC support is already upstream in 4.9. Surely, there's a bit of difference between GCC supporting Andes arch and being able to build apps for MT7681 (similar to that which we experience with ESP8266).

Mandatory CNX link: http://www.cnx-software.com/2014/09/01/ ... wdfunding/

Andes has actually been around for eight years now. Just that nobody mainstream uses it.
http://www.andestech.com/en/index/index.htm

They do seem to be trying to support Open Source.
http://osdk.andestech.com/

Xtensa people are trying to support open source too. I think the build failures in gcc are just because they haven't been paying attention to the underlying code changes.

Wifi support on MT7681 requries NDA with Ralink to get SDK.

Ralink has shown little interest in the past for supporting open source.