nRF54 - nRF Connect SDK - Zephyr vs Bare Metal

[cbs_bsb]

Hi Nordic Dev,

I just saw the video about Bare Metal (BM), and was wondering about some of the differences between Zephyr based and BM NCS.

1. Power consumption is mentioned to be about the same, but is it expected that BM will have lower power comsumption than Zephyr based in the future?
2. Is there a difference in startup time, when waking from sleep and/or power off? Which is fastest?
3. Do you have any recommendations when the nRF54 use case is just a Bluetooth peripheral with some UART capabilities?

Thank you for your time

[PaKa]

1. No, it is expected to stay in the same ballpark forever, there is no reason to expect there to be a difference here

2. The RTOS option may be a bit longer as you also need to intialize the kernel and all subsystems. Note that the Bluetooth stack in bare metal also takes time to initialize so differences aren't that large.

3. Recommendation is to always pick the RTOS option unless there are pressing reasons to go for the Bare Metal, this as you are future proofing your design path picking the RTOS. this supports all features available while the Bare Metal only supports a sub-set of the features.