alt Hacker Newsthe more chips you have, the more complex the project becomes. BOM is one thing, every chip needs support passives and oscillators, but now you also need to coordinate communication between the chips, you need to devise a way to update firmwares and access both chips for debugging purposes... that might be worth to trade off for less battery life.
in my experience they are not that much difference between 2 design. The BLE FW is a binary blob that you will download at boot with 2 chip-design, or load it to correct address with single chip-design.
From the CPU perspective, they are the same