Espressif introduces S3 variant of ESP32 chip with Bluetooth 5.0 and 512kB sram

Espressif has announced the ESP32-S3, a variant of the ESP32-soc with which the Chinese company mainly focuses on applications for internet-of-things and artificial intelligence. The new version has Bluetooth LE 5.0 on board.

Compared to other variants of the ESP32 soc, the S3 variant has more sram, support for bluetooth 5.0 and more programmable GPIOs among other things. The basis of the ESP32-S3 is the Tensilica XTensa LX7 dual-core, which does its job at 240MHz. There are no singlecore variants. According to Espressif, vector instructions enable the chip to accelerate computations for neural networks.

The chip has 384kB rom and 512kB sram. In addition to support for Bluetooth LE 5.0, there is support for Wi-Fi based on the 802.11n protocol, i.e. Wi-Fi 4 at 2.4GHz. There are 44 programmable GPIOs including an Octal SPI interface, or eight I/Os, to control flash memory. Espressif builds the module in a 7x7mm QFN package. Espressif already offers several variants of its ESP32 soc. An S2 variant appeared last year. It also came in versions with a singlecore LX7 and did not have bluetooth support.