Espressif has unveiled its latest major chip in the form of the ESP32-E22. Officially referred to as a Radio Co-Processor (RCP), it’s intended to be used via its PCIe 2.1 or SDIO 3.0 host interface to provide wireless communications to an SoC or similar.
This wireless functionality includes full WiFi 6E functionality across all three bands, 160 MHz channel bandwidth and 2×2 MU-MIMO, making it quite a leap from the basic WiFi provided by e.g. the ESP32-S* and -C* series. There is also Bluetooth Classic and BLE 5.4 support, which is a relief for those who were missing Bluetooth Classic in all but the original ESP32 for e.g. A2DP sinks and sources.
The ESP32-E22 processing grunt is provided by two proprietary Espressif RISC-V CPU cores that can run at 500 MHz. At this point no details appear to be available about whether a low-power core is also present, nor any additional peripherals. Since the graphics on the Espressif PR article appear to be generic, machine-generated images – that switch the chip’s appearance from a BGA to an LQFP package at random – there’s little more that we can gather from there either.
Currently Espressif is making engineering samples available to interested parties after presumed vetting, which would indicate that any kind of public release will still be a while off. Whether this chip would make for an interesting stand-alone MCU or SoC along the lines of the -S3 or -P4 will remain a bit of a mystery for a bit longer.
Thanks to [Rogan] for the tip.
I other words, a wifi chip attached via PCIe like the typical realtek to bcom ones? Pretty much every wifi chip these days is stuffed full of firmware, sometimes loaded by linux and sometimes not. It doesn’t mean they’re usable as standalone micrcontrollers.
It makes me wonder though, considering espressif licenced the wifi IP in many of their previous chips, who supplied this wifi IP?
how many blobs and spy hardware inside?
Espressif: releases co-processor
Community: it’s our main processor now.
Exactly what I was thinking. 500 MHz and full bluetooth? This is the SoC.
I recently had to ventured into the space of USB WiFi adapters. They’re all terrible with linux and even on windows the drivers are extremely shoddy. If you’re happy with a 150Mbps USB2.0 adapter, I guess its fine, but if you want say 600Mbps + Bluetooth, good luck finding something that’s supported on Linux without reverse engineered Windows only drivers. Realtek is a REAL PoC in this space.
If you have a PCIe slot to spare, just buy an Intel PCIe WiFi+Bluetooth PCIe card and spare yourself the trouble.
I’m hopeful something like this ESP32-E22 plus a USB or PCIe MCU/SoC will show up and eat Realtek’s lunch and save us from garbage drivers
No problems at all with Mt7921AU USB wifi adapters like the Alfa AWUS036AXML – it’s had mainline support for a while now, works out of the box in Ubuntu
Do you have this adapter? If so how does it work and what distro are you running? Was looking at getting it , however there is conflicting information on its reliability to work in monitor mode. Went with the AWUS036ACHM. although later wouldn’t mind a AWUS036AXML. Atleast for wifi6 connection speed. just wondering about the monitor mode reliability.
Are you sure you just aren’t on a very old kernel? I find virtually every realtek stuff works out of the box, and you only need to patch if you’re doing things like packet injections (which I know is a big thing for some).
I was very interested in the E22 since this is the first ESP chip with dual-BT since the original one.
I had some back and forth emails with Espressif sales regarding the E22 and they finally told me:
“Regarding the ESP32-E22, I’d like to clarify that it does include an I2C interface. However, please note that the E22 operates only in slave mode and is designed as a communication passthrough module that does not support secondary development.”
That sound like it’s doesn’t support custom FW development.
If they only offered the M.2 module that would make sense to me.
But they showed a typical ESP devkit pcb too.
We are close to the 10 year anniversary of the original ESP32 and still no real successor with Dual-BT.
Thank you for those comments from Espressif. It does indeed sound like they intend the -E series to be purely auxiliary ICs and not stand-alone MCUs/SoCs. Considering the rated performance it makes you wonder what kind of Espressif chips they envision pairing it with. Maybe the -P4?
There’s no PCIe device on P4. And the USB device is anemic. So, no, I don’t think so
Non hackable radio ☹
“My mom always said espressif is like a box of chocolates. You never know what you’re gonna get.”
Let us wait for some PDF and the first samples to see what we get.
What about ESP32-C5? Supposedly it fits between C3 and C6 AND gets upgrades.