Espressif just pulled the wraps off two fresh development kits aimed at one of its most ambitious chips yet: the dual-core RISC-V ESP32-S31. If you've been waiting for a board that blends heavy IoT muscle with edge AI capability, this pair is worth a long look.
What's the big deal with the ESP32-S31?
The new chip pairs two RISC-V cores in a heterogeneous setup. One runs up to 320 MHz for performance-hungry workloads, while the other sips power for everyday microcontroller chores. Espressif is pitching it at advanced IoT, machine learning inference, computer vision, and smart audio — all from a single chip with 60 GPIOs to spare.
On the radio side you get Wi-Fi 6 on 2.4 GHz, Bluetooth 5.4 Classic and Low Energy, plus an 802.15.4 radio with Thread and Zigbee. There's even an integrated gigabit Ethernet MAC, which is rare for an ESP32. RAM-wise, you're looking at 512 KB of on-chip SRAM and an eight-bit 250 MHz DDR bus for external PSRAM. One core also packs a 128-bit data path with SIMD for parallel number crunching.
CoreBoard vs. Korvo: pick your flavour
