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Not sure if they will fail, depends on how big a niche there is for this kind of powerful hardware. Might have been different if it had H.264 accel. and HDMI out though.

You have to see that the ESP8266 is currently just a crappy wifi module with very low throughput (like below 100k) and limited range. I agree it will probably be very successful, never before has wifi been so cheap to add to a project, but I doubt you can transmit audio or video with it. I wonder if people will figure out how to run custom code on its MCU, that would be awesome.

I'm currently exploring the TI CC3200, it has a good price point (30$ via TI) and is quite capable (80Mhz M4 Cortex, 256k RAM) - for me its close to the sweet spot. If TI lowered the price even more, they'd own the market.

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Its supposed to be >100MHz Xtensa. Should be enough for a lot of things if/when it gets hacked (as long as it has SPI for fast interconnect).

Then you have $10 modules based on 360MHz Ralink Mips soc, or $15 Qualcomm AR9331 400MHz (overclockable to ~500MHz) ones with 32/64MB ram. Those are very capable on their own.

Ah, I guess thats whats inside most Wifi routers. Are people using those for hobbyist projects though? I've never seen prototyping boards anywhere, and soldering those packages yourself requires a reflow oven by the looks of it.

Didn't know those SOCs are so high-powered, thanks for the info!

Various companies have been selling modules with these chips and all the appropriate RAM, Flash, power regulators, etc - for example, the VoCore, the Carambola, the HLK-RM04 (officially a WiFi-to-serial module but is supported by OpenWRT and breaks out most of the pins), etc.