The ESP32-P4 is the new hotness on the microcontroller market. With RISC-V architecture and two cores running 400 MHz, to ears of a certain vintage it sounds more like the heart of a Unix workstation than a traditional MCU. Time’s a funny thing like that. [DynaMight] was looking for an excuse to play with this powerful new system on a chip, so put together what he calls the GB300-P4: a commercial handheld game console with an Expressif brain transplant.
Older ESP32 chips weren’t quite up to 16-bit emulation, but that hadn’t stopped people trying; the RetroGo project by [ducalex] already has an SNES and Genesis/Mega Drive emulation mode, along with all the 8-bit you could ask for. But the higher-tech consoles can run a bit slow in emulation on other ESP32 chips. [DynaMight] wanted to see if the P4 performed better, and to no ones surprise, it did.
If the build quality on this handheld looks suspiciously professional, that’s because it is: [DynaMight] started with a GB300, a commercial emulator platform. Since the ESP32-P4 is replacing a MIPS chip clocked at 914 MHz in the original — which sounds even more like the heart of a Unix workstation, come to think of it — the machine probably doesn’t have better performance than it did from factory unless its code was terribly un-optimized. In this case, performance was not the point. The point was to have a handheld running RetroGo on this specific chip, which the project has evidently accomplished with flying colours. If you’ve got a GB300 you’d rather put an “Expressif Inside” sticker on, the project is on github. Otherwise you can check out the demo video below. (DOOM starts at 1:29, because of course it runs DOOM.)
The last P4 project we featured was a Quadra emulator; we expect to see a lot of projects with this chip in the new year, and they’re not all going to be retrocomputer-related, we’re sure. If you’re cooking up something using the new ESP32, or know someone who is, you know what to do.
Since the ESP32-P4 came out, I’ve been wondering how its two RISC-V cores compare (in broad, general real-world performance) to the similar ESP32s with two Xtensa cores… and it’s been remarkably hard for me to find useful data or examples. So even though this doesn’t address that in detail, it’s still good to see.
I mean, according to the datasheets from espressif, the P4 is both much faster and more performant per Mhz in CoreMark, which makes it clear how quickly RISC-5 designs are improving:
2489.62 CoreMark; 6.92 CoreMark/MHz for the ESP32-P4 (both cores, 360mhz version, not the 400)
1181.60 CoreMark; 4.92 CoreMark/MHz for the ESP32-S3 (both cores, 240mhz)
but although that’s very helpful, it’s still a synthetic benchmark and we’re taking their word for it.