Following Intel's IDF16 in Shenzhen, China, reports swirled that Intel announced Apollo Lake. When we reached out to Intel for more details, however, we were informed that this was a mischaracterization of what was revealed.
Apollo Lake is the successor to Intel's Airmont architecture in the Atom product line. It is also the most significant architectural redesign in the Atom line since the introduction of Silvermont in 2013. Airmont, which succeeded Silvermont, was merely a die shrink with a beefier iGPU and little to no alternations to the CPU cores.
From a high-level view point, Intel has stated that Apollo Lake will bring improvements to both CPU and iGPU performance while also reducing power consumption.
At IDF16 in Shenzhen, Intel told attendees that Apollo Lake was on track to be released some time in the second half of this year, but it did not set a specific release date and it released relatively few technical details.
The ones that Intel did confirm at the event are in regard to the iGPU and Apollo Lake's memory support. When Apollo Lake is available, it will contain an Intel HD Graphics processor based on Intel's 9th generation graphics architecture. (This is the same graphics architecture as Skylake.)
As for Apollo lake's memory controller, like Skylake it will support both DDR3L and DDR4L. DDR3L support is limited to 1866 MHz; Intel didn't specify a frequency for the DDR4L memory, but it did mention low-power DDR4L, which likely points to memory clocked at 2133 MHz.
Given the release window for Apollo Lake, we already expected that it would use the 9th gen graphics architecture and support DDR3L and some form of DDR4, but until now nothing had been confirmed.
The company also gave us a look at the expected cost of producing Apollo Lake based systems: They should be lower than Silvermont or Airmont devices, which gives us a rather broad idea of what an Apollo Lake notebook might cost, but there are no specifics at this time.
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