alt Hacker NewsIt's a family of microcontrollers by Espressif. A microcontroller (MCU) is a type of integrated circuit (IC: physical appearance: Black rectangle of epoxy with exposed metal tabs). It has, in the same IC, a CPU, RAM, non-volatile FLASH memory, and a collection of peripherals which vary depending on the MCU. These usually include I/O protocols, ADCs, DACs, DMA controllers, math processors etc.
Stated another way: An MCU, like the ESP32, is a tiny computer, sans the hardware you physically interface with it.
The computing power, and memory is much lower than your desktop or laptop PC (or mobile phone), but if you are using it to run a dedicated task, instead of using a big OS like Linux or Windows, it can complete the tasks really fast (often microseconds) and with minimal power use. This is because it's easy to program to do exactly what you need, with nothing competing for the hardware.
A note on ESP in particular compared to other MCUs: It's one of the only (Or was?) options which has Wi-Fi integrated into the MCU itself. It's a good default if you want that.
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I’d say as well, that a huge difference is a microcontroller has direct access memory (I.e. without translation), and a bigger computers CPU/SoC has an MMU (memory management unit) that does address translation. This is a key hardware difference for isolation of multiple processes, which you don’t typically have in a microcontroller (you _could_ have an MPU to give you some partitioning, but that’s further down the road).
I think their point was more: is an ESP32 more like a arduino (or any other MCU) running bare metal or some thine RTOS or more like a raspberry pi which is more like a mini computer running a full fledged Linux. And I guess the answer it kind of always sat in between a little bit and now the family kind of spreads out across this whole spectrum.
> I's one of the only (Or was?) options which has Wi-Fi integrated into the MCU itself. It's a good default if you want that.
Indeed. The closest direct competitor is likely the Nordic nRF52840, which does bluetooth + thread, but can't talk actual wifi