I'd guess they're shooting for a higher performance process & that it just doesnt work very well for the analog/rf design a wifi chip might use. Or they're just not experienced yet adapting tbese smaller nodes.
I'd love to know what kind of nodes various bits of wifi hardware so use. And what nodes existing (all wireless capable) Espressif chips are on.
Maybe next year we'll see this chip paired with another die in the same package for the analog stuff adding in WiFi, Bluetooth, an ethernet Mac, a 1 watt audio amp, an analog mux, and all the other things to make it a real 'system' on chip.
Extremely excited to see what we can do with MIPI CSI/DSI, H264 encode, and JPEG encode in a tiny micro like this one. I can definitely see the value in this part
This stuff just keeps getting cooler and cooler. Wonder what the price point will be on these? Hopefully right in line with the rest of their offerings!
I'd imagine they're just going to leverage SDIO and a cheaper ESP32 variant (like a C3) to bring wifi to the chip. Makes sense when you start looking at EMC/EMI with high speed interfaces, adding Wifi just adds another layer to the chaos which might not be needed in a lot of applications
Looks good for PoE cameras where security is important and wireless is an anti-feature due to deauth attacks and insecure radio basebands.