If it helps, I've used earlier Atmel AVR chips, as well as the ESP32-S3.
8-bit AVR is an extremely clean, relatively simple instruction set that can be viably hand-coded. It's fairly straightforward to calculate the exact number of cycles your code will use, which is handy for applications requiring deterministic timing and for knowing worst-case execution time of interrupt handlers.
If the C3 instruction set is anything like the S3, I'm willing to bet it's not as straightforward.
Atmel also tends to do a better job of their documentation. I've lost count of how many confirmed errata I've reported to Espressif, and the time (and steam) I lost troubleshooting them in the first place.
I like the S3, and it's heaps powerful, but for small projects that don't need advanced peripherals like Wifi, DMA, etc. I can envision that AVR as being a fine choice.
Doing asm on the AVR is beautiful, you can count clock cycles easily and then observe them on the scope.
I wrote a bit banging serial interface for an AVR once and had a mystery when I was testing it from a PC just with a basic echo. Every Nth character would be wrong. Was able to figure out a timing problem by counting clock cycles and found the bug in my code.
Was cool to see it align with what I was seeing on my oscilloscope.
Thanks for correcting me. Are there any good, small "Hello World" examples of RISC-V programming with the C3 you can point me to? I'd love to get a sense of how it compares in practice.
8-bit AVR is an extremely clean, relatively simple instruction set that can be viably hand-coded. It's fairly straightforward to calculate the exact number of cycles your code will use, which is handy for applications requiring deterministic timing and for knowing worst-case execution time of interrupt handlers.
If the C3 instruction set is anything like the S3, I'm willing to bet it's not as straightforward.
Atmel also tends to do a better job of their documentation. I've lost count of how many confirmed errata I've reported to Espressif, and the time (and steam) I lost troubleshooting them in the first place.
I like the S3, and it's heaps powerful, but for small projects that don't need advanced peripherals like Wifi, DMA, etc. I can envision that AVR as being a fine choice.