If your going to continue doing power consumption tests on microcontrollers, you should get a Nordic Power Profiler Kit 2. It only $99 and it allows you to get MUCH more detailed current usage over time compared to just using a shunt and voltmeter. It can also accurately measure down to the very low uA and even nA range.

great video as always 👍 thanks for sharing your experience with all of us 👍🙂

hi Gary, great work as always. I wanted to add my voice to the chorus who thinks you should test the pico at the same clock rate as the ESP 32. As others have mentioned, the Pico is capable of clocking well in excess of 300 MHz. It would give a more fair comparison

Any thoughts how the TWO Ultra-Low co-processors on the ESP32-S3 (ULP-RISC-V , ULP-FSM) could be used to improve performance / power-efficiency?

What voltage was used for powering the boards? If it was 5 V, then the results are skewed in favor of Pi Pico, which has an efficient switching mode 3.3 V regulator instead of a linear one wasting about 1/3 of the power.

I'd be very interested to hear how these powerful microcontrollers compare to some of the old 8 bit ultra low power microcontrollers such as ATMEGA AVR line. Often my projects have no speed requirement. Maybe they only need to wake up and read some sensors every few minutes. In these cases, I'd be curious to know what is the absolute most efficient. Additionally, those chips can run without any external components at voltages as low as 1.8V, and clock speeds around 250 kHz. ...would be cool to compare all of those options.

Excellent video

One more comment, given that the RP2040 does not have single cycle divide (STM32 M3/M4/M7 all do) I was surprised at how well it performed on the clock for clock basis against the LX6 and LX7. it might be interesting to repeat this test against an STM32M4.

I suspect that the most important power issue with microcontrollers is not how many micro-joules are required per million instructions (or whatever you care to use), but the total amount of energy used for what is often intermittent usage. Of course, if there's a simple-minded program that runs in a tight loop, as is often the case, then that won't help much. However, with a well designed micro-controller and software which is interrupt driven and has the ability to put it into a proper "sleep" mode when not executing code, then I would hope that the power consumption can be minimised. Also, those CPU architectures which have power saving modes when running light usage applications might have an advantage, although I suspect that sort of thing doesn't apply to micro-controllers in general, and is more likely to be found on the sort of processors to be found in tablets and smartphones.

Thanks Gary, great comparison, well explained. I'm curious how the 'Arduino Nano RP2040 Connect' would do in this "Battle Royale". My guess is that it would be close to the Raspberry Pi Pico, but not sure. Any ideas?

Good video Garry. Have you had a chance to play with the ESP32-S3? I want to know if migrating an Arduino ESP32 project to the ESP32-S3 is straightforward. Either way, ill be working on that this week to find out for myself.

Amazing. Despite different architectures and features in silicon, these 3 perform basically the same amount of computation for the power used. And it sort of makes sense, for this test they mostly move the same amount of data between registers, trough mostly the same cmos circuits, with the same size transistors. I would've thought the tensilica cores had an edge with their divide circuit, but I guess it just requires it to power a whole lot of transistors. So, maybe faster but with the power expense. Maybe us software guys get too hung up on architecture and api debates, the cmos circuits and sram blocks just do what they do.

Are there boards with the same CPU that are more power efficient (because of better regulator, …)

Hey Gary, can you do speedtest G for Galaxy Z Fold 4 vs iphone 14 pro/max?

Results are strange... In my case, when i switched from ESP32 to ESP32-S3 i've got more performance when decoding Jpg from ov2640 on the fly. Like +15FPS on avg. in HQVGA, what allowed me to move into QVGA mode. Now i'm wondering how... Could it be due to better IRAM/DRAM cache subsystem?

What is the efficiency with Wifi enabled ?

esp32 c3 is the risc v single core, and the frequency is low. maybe you can have a test for risc v controllors.

Hey Gary, nice video. The RPI Pico W has a configurable clock speed up to about 400Mhz. You could set the Pico to 240MHz to exactly match the ESP32 boards. I usually run the clock on the Pico at application specific speeds for example HD Video output needs specific speed depending on resolution. I suspect higher clock speeds might be less power efficient but faster to complete your test. I wonder how this might impact things? 😬 as always great content

presented with double efficiency

Can you also test stm32 for fun

How would a Teensy 4 do in this test?

Esp32 with 9sec, 87mA Pico with 20sec, 38mA Esp 2.22 times faster, devide the 87mA with 2.22 To make it even, its gonna be 39mA, So for me same efficiency😁

Runs more fast in micropython compared to c++