It will be great to have another cheap microcontroller in the space with much more advanced radios. Is there any info on power draw? I didn’t see that from the initial specs.
I'm puzzled about his Rust remark; if it's an RV32 then Rust already supports nostd on riscv32i-unknown-none-elf, riscv32imac-unknown-none-elf, and riscv32imc-unknown-none-elf.
So, there's language support for it, but it'll still be necessary to have driver support, ideally a whole support library in Rust.
Most BLE or WiFi enabled microcontrollers have a binary blob for driving connectivity, or deeply C based code that can be a challenge to integrate idiomatically in Rust.
Yes, the esp8266 and esp32 are power hogs and run quite warm, which is why you don't see them in battery powered gadgets very often. It'll be interesting to do real world measurements when this chip is available.
I don't speak Chinese, but this linked page seems to have some information on the power draw: https://www.ednchina.com/news/2020SONGSHANHU-3.html . I don't know if that is just the WiFi component, or the whole SoC. You can also see two other kind of SoCs they contrast their BL602 offering against.