iLabs

We're exited to announce that both the Challenger RP2040 WiFi/BLE as well as our new Challenger RP2350 WiFi6/BLE5 boards now can be used with ESP Hosted (https://github.com/espressif/esp-hosted) stack allowing for really high speed network transfers. High level support for this is already available in the Arduino-Pico framework.

Great!

Do you have some figures on memory usage? As far as I understand, ESP-Hosted keeps the Wifi/BT stack in the MCU. That should be no problem for the RP2350 (especially with PSRAM), but might very well be a problem for the RP2040. In my usage scenarios of the Pico-W for example I always encounter memory problems and the Pico-W also uses MCU memory for Wifi.

Not sure exactly what your use case is but simply comparing the WiFServer example between the Challenger RP2040 WiFi/BLE and the Pico-W I can see the following:

Challenger RP2040 WiFi/BLE
Sketch uses 157860 bytes (1%) of program storage space. Maximum is 8384512 bytes.
Global variables use 73376 bytes (27%) of dynamic memory, leaving 188768 bytes for local variables. Maximum is 262144 bytes.

Pico-W
Sketch uses 359736 bytes (17%) of program storage space. Maximum is 2093056 bytes.
Global variables use 71860 bytes (27%) of dynamic memory, leaving 190284 bytes for local variables. Maximum is 262144 bytes.

The Pico-W solution uses considerably more program storage and the ESP Hosted based solution uses 1.5KByte more RAM than the pico solution. Any dynamically allocated memory used by the upper layers of the networks stack I expect to be the exact same so RAM-wise I would say they are very similar. The ESP Hosted solution uses 2 required 1600 bytes statically allocated SPI buffers which account for some of the difference.