A $2 microcontroller runs real-time computer vision with hidden SIMD instructions
SIMD-accelerated computer vision on a $2 microcontroller
The ESP32-S3, a $2 chip with a 240MHz dual-core CPU, quietly supports 128-bit SIMD instructions that few developers know about. The author wrote a SIMD-accelerated FAST corner detector in assembly, working around missing misaligned reads and signed-only comparisons by XORing pixels with 0x80 to shift them into a comparable range. The result roughly doubles throughput from 5.1 to 11.2 megapixels per second, enough to process a 30fps VGA stream.
For silicon that's cheaper than the average coffee, that's pretty cool.