yeah, definitely meant microcontroller. I'm targeting my statement at hobbyists and people working on solo projects.

If you're some company that has the R&D budget to make it work with a beefy microprocessor, then that makes perfect sense.

You’d be surprised how far you can get with an ESP32-S3, the Xtensa LX7 is a weird little chip, but surprisingly can be quite powerful. Though I’m biased of course because we use them to their limits at work!

haha, if you can get an ESP32 to do image processing, then you're not an average hobbyist

I guess, but it’s also pretty open code these days now that the S3’s LX7 has some nice vector extensions and other additions for ML applications :)

https://github.com/espressif/esp-who

It’s not out of reach for hobbyists, I think, though getting it to run very well might be. And I would certainly tell anyone interested to start with something more powerful first!

I’m currently experimenting with porting Arraymancer to the S3, just to see how it can run, outside of work time mind you.

https://github.com/mratsim/Arraymancer

Slightly orthogonal to what we are discussing above, but more to show that these weird micros have some surprising grunt if you know how to make them sing.

Though I still wish ESP-IDFs malloc was better behaved.